At high school he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe (including a meeting with William Butler Yeats) as a prize.

[4] He then received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships for his studies of Melville; a monograph derived from his master's thesis and subsequent research, Call Me Ishmael, was published in 1947.

[6] In 1941, Olson moved to New York City's Greenwich Village and began living with Constance "Connie" Wilcock in a common-law marriage; they had one child, Katherine.

At that point, they moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, eventually rising to associate chief under Alan Cranston.

In January 1945, he was offered his choice of two positions (including Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and the Cabinet-rank Postmaster General) in the Roosevelt administration.

[7] The death of Roosevelt and concomitant ascendancy of Harry Truman in April 1945 inspired Olson to dedicate himself to a literary career.

[4] From 1946 to 1948, Olson visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital, drawn to the poet and his work though repelled by some of his political ideas.

[6] In September 1948, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, replacing longtime friend Edward Dahlberg for the academic year.

Despite financial difficulties and Olson's eccentric administrative style, Black Mountain College continued to support work by Cage, Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage, and many other members of the 1950s American avant-garde throughout Olson's rectorship.

[8] Olson's ideas came to influence a generation of poets, including writers Duncan, Dorn, Denise Levertov, and Paul Blackburn.

[11] In January 1964, Kaiser was killed by a drunk driver in a head-on automobile accident,[12] although a grieving Olson incorrectly theorized her death as a potential suicide because of her dissatisfaction with her life in the Buffalo area.

His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of" are more immediately accessible and manifest a sincere, original, emotionally powerful voice.

An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, situated in Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled.