Mary Oliver Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Picture Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mary Oliver was a published author.

Born on September 10, 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, she passed away on January 17, 2019. She was an American poet and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The work that she has done was inspired by nature as opposed to the human world and has come from the lifelong passion that she always had for going on solitary walks in nature and the wild.

When she was still alive, Mary was very private by her nature and this led to her giving very few interviews throughout the years. She preferred instead to let the work that she has done to speak for itself. It has spoken for the past five decades and will continue to speak to countless amounts of readers.

The New York Times acknowledged the poet and author as being the country’s ‘best-selling poet’. Mary published her first book of poetry when she was just twenty-eight years old in 1963. No Voyage and Other Poems was reissued by Houghton Mifflin in 1965 in the United States after having been printed in the UK first by Dent Press.

Since then, Oliver has gone on to release many different written works of poetry and prose. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College when she was a young woman but did not take on any degree. For several years, she resided in upper New York state at the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay. There in the late fifties she met Molly Alone Cook, a photographer.

The two made a home together over four decades, residing mostly in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They resided there until Cook passed away in 2005.

Oliver has received many different awards over the course of her long career. In 1984, her book American Primitive won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has received other such awards like the Shelley Memorial Award, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light.

Oliver has also received the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, as well as a Lannan Foundation Literary Award, as well as the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. Her essays have been featured in Best American Essays (editions 1996, 1998, and 2001) as well as the Anchor Essay Annual 1998, and Orion, Onearth, and different periodicals.

Oliver edited Best American Essays 2009. She has written books about the craft of poetry, including A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance. These have been used in different writing programs. She has read quite a bit and has read in nearly every state and different countries.

In addition to writing, Oliver worked to help others with the craft. She led workshops at different colleges and universities. She held residencies at places such as Case Western Reserve University, the University of Cincinnati, Bucknell University, and Sweet Briar College. From 1995, she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College for five years.

Oliver also received Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston, Dartmouth College, and Tufts University. She resides in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a place that provides inspiration for a lot of her work.

Upstream: Selected Essays is a 2016 book by Mary Oliver. If you’ve never read the work of award-winning Mary Oliver, this is a great way to become familiar with her writing in this selection of essays that focuses on her love of the natural world and the craft of writing.

Mary goes over the pleasure that can be found in artistic labor, where she can find safety and solace within the woods. With different topics and focuses, through these essays Oliver is able to share with the readers the discoveries that she has made, the curiosity that she has, and the excitement for how grand our world can be.

This is an incredible collection of the work of the late poet and author. Even if you aren’t familiar with essays or it isn’t your medium of choice, this work may really change your mind. These essays were meant to be read by anybody and everybody, wherein Oliver is able to share her observations on nature and more, inspiring others to look for more wonder in the outdoors. Yes, there is also a piece on Ralph Waldo Emerson!

Upstream is a great collection of essays that will provoke unique thoughts and allow readers an insight into the mind, life, and passions of Mary Oliver. See what things move her by getting your hands on a copy today.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver is a 2017 book by Mary Oliver. This collection was a New York Times bestseller as well as being a Read with Jenna Pick. From the prize-winning poet comes a collection of some of the best writing that she has done, compiled all in one place for easy leafing. Read from the beginning to the end or just open to a page that you like and start reading!

Anything goes when it comes to Devotions, a favorite among readers. The Washington Post also had praise for the work, stating that ‘the luminous writing provides respite form our crazy world’ while showing how ‘mindfulness can define and transform a life’.

Throughout the course of her career, this poet was able to reach out to different readers with her verse, talking about the love that she had for the natural world and meditating on the powerful bonds that exist between all living things.

The book is particularly poignant because it was arranged by Oliver herself, not long before she passed in 2019. Devotions brings readers Oliver’s work from her first book of poetry through her last, Felicity (published in 2015).

This volume shows the poet at her best. Inside these pages, she gives us a unique collection of her observations of the natural world and what she loves about the wild. Check out all that Oliver had to say by getting your hands on a copy of Devotions.