His father, Scottish-born Andrew MacLeish, worked as a dry-goods merchant and was a founder of the Chicago department store Carson Pirie Scott.

For his college education, MacLeish went to Yale University, where he majored in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was selected for the Skull and Bones society.

[8] In 1923, MacLeish left his law firm and moved with his wife to Paris, where they joined the community of literary expatriates that included such members as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.

They also became part of the famed coterie of Riviera hosts Gerald and Sarah Murphy, which included Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley.

Both MacLeish and Crosby had overturned the normal expectations of society, rejecting conventional careers in the legal and banking fields.

Crosby published MacLeish's long poem "Einstein" in a deluxe edition of 150 copies that sold quickly.

[9]: 183  In 1932, MacLeish published his long poem "Conquistador", which presents Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs as symbolic of the American experience.

In 1938, MacLeish published as a book a long poem "Land of the Free", built around a series of 88 photographs of the rural depression by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and the Farm Security Administration and other agencies.

Support from unexpected places, such as M. Llewellyn Raney of the University of Chicago libraries, alleviated the ALA letter-writing campaign against MacLeish's nomination.

At the meeting, Putnam relayed his intention to continue working at the library, that he would be given the title of librarian emeritus, and that his office would be down the hall from MacLeish's.

"[12]: 302 A question from MacLeish's daughter, Mimi, led him to realize, "Nothing is more difficult for the beginning librarian than to discover [in] what profession he was engaged.

MacLeish solved the problem of acquisitions and cataloging through establishing another committee instructed to seek advice from specialists outside of the Library of Congress.

A set of general principles on acquisitions was then developed to ensure that, though it was impossible to collect everything, the Library of Congress would acquire the bare minimum of canons to meet its mission.

[1] Archibald MacLeish also assisted with the development of the new "Research and Analysis Branch" of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

"These operations were overseen by the distinguished Harvard University historian William L. Langer, who, with the assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, set out immediately to recruit a professional staff drawn from across the social sciences.

Over the next 12 months, academic specialists from fields ranging from geography to classical philology descended upon Washington, bringing with them their most promising graduate students, and set up shop in the headquarters of the Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch at Twenty-third and E Streets, and in the new annex to the Library of Congress.

These jobs were heavily involved with propaganda, which was well-suited to MacLeish's talents; he had written quite a bit of politically motivated work in the previous decade.

Despite a long history of debate over the merits of Marxism, MacLeish came under fire from anticommunists in the 1940s and 1950s, including J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy.

Time magazine's Whittaker Chambers cited him as a fellow traveler in a 1941 article: "By 1938, U. S. Communists could count among their allies such names as Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson, Kyle Crichton (Robert Forsythe), Malcolm Cowley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck, George Soule, many another.

He was the literary figure who played the most important role in Ezra Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was held between 1946 and 1958, after being found unfit to stand trial for high treason.

We called one poet who just did not think much of moons or us, and then decided to reach higher for somebody with more zest in his soul – for Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes.

The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress came from a donation in 1937 from Archer M. Huntington, a wealthy ship builder.

However, MacLeish was happy that having Auslander in the post attracted many other poets, such as Robinson Jeffers and Robert Frost, to hold readings at the library.

[23] In the June 5, 1972, issue of The American Scholar, MacLeish laid out in an essay his philosophy on libraries and librarianship, further shaping modern thought on the subject: No true book [...] was ever anything else than a report. [...]

Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves.

Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby Dick, it is still [...] a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

It asserts that [...] all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. [...]