He was born in New Rochelle, New York, born to some wealth—his father was a diamond merchant—and after George’s mother’s death when he was four, the father remarried and moved the family to San Francisco, where George grew up. He started college at Oregon State and was expelled within months for staying out all night with his girlfriend, Mary, who became his wife. The young couple took off for New York City, where they met other young poets and started a press (with George’s money) and where, at the age of twenty-four, he published his first book of poems, Discrete Series. It was 1934, the country was in the depths of the Depression, and—this is a story poets know—George and Mary got involved in tenants’-rights strikes in Brooklyn, took up political organizing, joined the Communist Party of America, which eventually sent George to work in the auto factories in Detroit. During those years he simply set poetry aside. When the U.S. joined the war in 1941, he was thirty-three years old, working in a critical war industry, and he didn’t have to go, but he enlisted, elected to be in the infantry, and fought his way across France until he was wounded in 1944, awarded a Purple Heart, and sent home, to a country that was not hospitable to the young radicals of the 1930s.