A Study Guide for Phyllis McGinley's "Midcentury Love Letter"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Phyllis McGinley's "Midcentury Love Letter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535828550

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Midcentury Love Letter

Phyllis McGinley

1953

Introduction

Midcentury Love Letter is a love poem written by American author Phyllis McGinley. The poem, written in the form of a sonnet, was first published in the New Yorker magazine on February 14, 1953. It was then included in McGinley's 1954 poetry collection, The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley. McGinley's poetry tends to be light and humorous, but Midcentury Love Letter runs counter to form in that it hints at the existence of a world of darkness, alienation, and loneliness in the cold war era following World War II.

McGinley achieved considerable popularity during the peak of her career in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a highly regarded author of books for children, and she remains perhaps best known in the twenty-first century as the author of The Year without a Santa Claus (originally published in Good Housekeeping magazine), on which an animated television classic is based. Her poetry was routinely published in the New Yorker and other prominent publications. Her 1960 poetry collection Times Three won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1961. McGinley was also an accomplished essayist, regularly publishing articles in American Scholar and in various women's magazines.

McGinley was a controversial figure, for much of her writing was a defense of domesticity and traditional feminine roles. It was thus out of step with a growing feminist movement that, for some readers, rendered her work irrelevant to the needs and concerns of modern women. Feminist author Betty Friedan would later dismiss her as one of a set of housewife writers. In the context of this controversy, her image appeared on the cover of Time magazine on June 18, 1965. Midcentury Love Letter is available in The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, published by Viking in 1954.

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