Randall Jarrell (1914–1965), poet, novelist, and literary critic, was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended both Vanderbilt University, where he became an instructor in English, and Kenyon College. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. Jarrell translated his experiences of war into two volumes of poetry, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), in which he examined the lives of individual fighting men in compassionate detail, indicting the evil of war. According to many critics, these collections remain unsurpassed as American poetic contributions to the literature of World War II. Jarrell was also a renowned literary critic.

In subsequent poems Jarrell turned his attention to the "dailiness of life" in civilian America. He was particularly interested in the role of women in society, whom he saw as trapped or victimized. The Woman at the Washington Zoo received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1961. Other themes included loneliness and fear of aging and death. Childhood is the subject of his last book of poems, The Lost World (1965). His only novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), is an affectionate satire of academic life. Jarrell was killed while walking beside a highway in North Carolina.