The family lived on a tiny farm in rural Wisconsin and the children went to a small country school where Edward won good grades from his teachers and attacks from a bully.
Gently guided by his brother-in-law, paper chemist Westbrook Steele, he won scholarships to Swarthmore and then to Cornell College in Iowa, where he fell in love with Milton’s poetry and began to publish his own.
At age 20 he became the youngest Yale Younger Poet when his first book of poems, The Deer Come Down, was selected for publication by series editor Stephen Vincent Benet.
Repatriated with the other U.S. students, he earned his master's degree and taught at Harvard, where he founded lifelong friendships with some of the best poets and writers of his generation.
He translated a prize-winning French novel, The Young Concubine, and began his second book of poems, The Faultless Shore, published after the war, in 1946.
After the war Weismiller declined an invitation to join the newly formed CIA, which succeeded the OSS; instead he went home to his family in Southern California and commenced work on his novel, The Serpent Sleeping, sustained by a Guggenheim writing fellowship.
In 1948 the Rhodes Trust invited back the scholars whose time had been cut short by the war, allowing them to bring their new families, so he earned his doctorate from Oxford.
Day, traveling to England, France, Prague, and all the way to Russia in a special tour with distinguished veterans from all the services, then-Vice President Gore, and then-Secretary of the Army Togo West.
[6] In 1941, Random House hired Weismiller, then a 26-year-old student, to translate the first award-winning novel of Franco-Khmer poet Makhali-Phal into English.
In 2008, Professor Weismiller began advising a literary team working to produce an updated version of his original translation incorporating cultural background material unavailable in 1941.