Bink Noll collection

Collection

Identifier: MC 78

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Contains Bink Noll's poetry (drafts, published versions), correspondence (including with other poets like James Dickey, Richard Eberhart, George Garrett, Archibald MacLeish, William Meredith, W. S. Merwin, Stephen Spender, May Sarton), class materials from his courses at Beloit College, photographs, articles about him, other writings, appointment books, notes and observations, and his diary from 1945.

Dates

circa 1945-1986

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open for research; however, certain materials are very fragile and require Archives staff for handling, or use may be restricted altogether.

Biographical / Historical

Excerpted from The Beloit Daily News (Monday, Nov. 10, 1986)

Lou B. "Bink" Noll was a widely published poet and professor of English at Beloit College. His poetry volumes include The House published in 1984, The Feast in 1967 and The Center of the Circle in 1962. His work appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and the Chicago Tribune.

Bink Noll was born April 15, 1927, in Orange N.J., the son of Louis and Elsie Marie Barker Noll. He served in the Merchant Marine from August 1945 to January 1947. After earning his BA degree from Princeton in 1948 he was granted an MA degree in 1950 from Johns Hopkins. He received his PhD from the the University of Colorado in 1956. He joined the Beloit College faculty in 1953, and a year later was appointed to the English faculty of Dartmouth College where he taught for six years. A Fullbright grant to lecture on American Literature in Zaragoza Spain, followed in 1960-61. He returned to Beloit College in 1961 and became a full professor in 1969.

Noll received the Hewlett-Mellon Grant for research, and the Uhrig Foundation Award as Beloit College's teacher of the year in 1965. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1974, one of the 154 creative writers honored in written competition.

Among his other achievements and affiliations over his life, Noll was a playwright, a member of the editorial board of Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the founders of the Wisconsin Poetry Circuit, a member of the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board, a member of the Wisconsin Public Radio Board of Directors, poet-in-residence at Lawrence University in 1977, and resident fellow in creative writing at Princeton University.

Bink Noll died in November, 1986. He had two daughters, Lynne and Sarah, and a son, Christopher.