Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods

by Daniel Hoffman

Paul Bunyan is the giant of American folklore, so huge that several states claim him as their own―some say he was born in Michigan, others claim Minnesota, still others, Maine. Daniel Hoffman's Paul Bunyan shows that the hero's origins are more surprising still. 
      More than another recounting of Paul Bunyan's adventures, this book is a classic of American folklore. First published in 1949, this new edition traces the clues of origin to turn-of-the-century logging camps, to the sparse record of actual folktales, and then to the ways these yarns were repeated, revised, simplified, or distorted.

213 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Daniel Hoffman served as Poet Laureate in 1973-74 (when the post was known as Consultant in Poetry of The Library of Congress). His first book, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was W. H. Auden's choice for the 1954 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Among its dozen successor volumes are Brotherly Love (1981), a nominee for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems 1948-2003; and The Whole Nine Yards: Longer Poems (2009).

Best known of his critical studies is another National Book Award nominee, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972).

Among his distinctions, Hoffman received the Arthur Rense prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005, and, in 2003 from The Sewanee Review, the Aiken-Taylor Award for Contemporary American Poetry. He was given the Memorial medal of the Magyar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poets.

Born in 1923 in New York City, Daniel Hoffman in 1948 married the poet and editor Elizabeth McFarland (d. 2005). They had two children. He took three degrees from Columbia, and taught there, at Swarthmore College, and at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1993 as the Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. From 1988-99 he was Poet in Residence, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and administered the American Poets' Corner. He lives in Swarthmore, PA, and on Cape Rosier in Maine.