In Memoriam

Louis Daniel L.D. Brodsky

 

Louis Daniel “L.D.” Brodsky died on June 16, 2014 in his home in St. Louis, MO.

L.D. was born and grew up in St. Louis, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School.  Besides his academic excellence, he was an all-around athlete, playing varsity football, varsity soccer, and varsity baseball, and serving as President of the Athletic Association in his senior year.

 L.D. earned a B.A. in Spanish, magna cum laude, at Yale in 1963, where he played freshman soccer and rowed crew all four years, earning the Major Y Award and Numerals.  He received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967, and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1968. 

L.D.’s passion for writing poetry began in 1963, and over his career he wrote close to 12,000 poems and authored 83 volumes of poetry, which garnered praise from Maya Angelou, Elie Wiesel, and many other notable authors.  He also wrote 25 volumes of prose, including nine books of short fiction. 

 In 1988, he founded Time Being Press (later Time Being Books), a publishing company specializing in poetry. 

 His final endeavor was writing The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart (Time Being Books, 2014), chronicling his year-plus-long journey living with brain cancer. 

In addition to his writing, L.D. was a leading William Faulkner expert, authoring nine books of scholarship on Faulkner and amassing, over a 30-year period, one of the four largest collections of William Faulkner materials in the world.  In 1988, he transferred ownership of his collection to Southeast Missouri State University and continued to serve as curator of the collection, developing it on behalf of the university.

Although L.D.’s writing and collecting brought him great joy, his greatest accomplishments in life, he said, were his daughter and son, Trilogy Mattson and Louis Daniel Troika Brodsky III.

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