Author Archives

About Jerome Badanes

Jerome Badanes, the author of the cult novel, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon, makes a posthumous appearance with this immensely powerful poetry collection. Written at the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement, these poems bring together disparate threads of this century’s historical epochs—World War II, the rhythms of the post-Beat era, and the atmosphere of 1960s and ’70s America. These moments are reanimated by Badanes’s poems, which continue to resonate with today’s political and cultural climate. This timeless and haunting volume, assembled by Badanes himself, gives us another chance to experience the work of this compassionate existentialist. Jerome Badanes was a novelist, poet, and screenwriter who died in 1995 at age fifty-eight. A professor at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and SUNY Purchase, Badanes was born and raised in Brooklyn. He won an Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan, and spent much of the sixties as an antiwar activist, staging street theater.