Lowell brought assorted baggage from his New England background to his personal and professional life. For his rigid piety, critics called him the "Catholic poet." His marriage to fiction writer Jean Stafford foundered because of his infidelities, depression, and alcoholism. In 1941, the couple lived in Baton Rouge while he taught at Louisiana State University, then resettled in Boston. At the height of World War II, Lowell spent five months in jail for refusing to register for the draft. He gained parole in March 1944 and undertook janitorial duties at the nurses' quarters of St. Vincent's hospital. He recounts the experience through "In the Cage" in Lord Weary's Castle (1946), an antiauthoritarian volume that won him the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
In 1951, Lowell suffered full-blown manic depression, which burdened him until his death. After marrying critic Elizabeth Hardwick, he settled on Marlborough Street near his childhood home, entered psychoanalysis, and enjoyed a period of stability. While teaching and lecturing at Iowa State University, Kenyon School of Letters, Boston University, and Harvard, he produced his best known free verse in Life Studies (1959). The collection, which won a National Book Award, tapped the energy and audacity of Beat poetry and recorded Lowell's break with Catholicism, soul-bearing confessions, and revelations of dishonor and scandal among some of Boston's most revered families.
