John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis on January 7, 1972, where he had taught poetry for years. He was 57. Berryman was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, a restless, tormented writer whose work pushed the confessional mode to its breaking point. Born John Allyn Smith Jr. on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma, he was 11 when his father shot himself outside the family's apartment in Tampa, Florida. The suicide haunted Berryman for the rest of his life and permeated his poetry. He studied at Columbia and Cambridge, taught at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Minnesota, and built a reputation as a brilliant, difficult, increasingly alcoholic academic. His masterpiece, "The Dream Songs," published in two volumes in 1964 and 1968, is a fractured epic of grief, madness, wit, and self-destruction told through his alter ego Henry. The 385 poems are funny, despairing, formally inventive, and deeply strange. They won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 and the National Book Award in 1969. Berryman's relationship with alcohol was catastrophic. He was hospitalized repeatedly and entered treatment programs that never lasted. His teaching was erratic, his personal life chaotic. He married three times. He attempted suicide more than once before the morning he walked onto the bridge, waved to a passerby, and jumped onto the embankment of the frozen Mississippi River below. He did not leave a note. His final collection, "Delusions, Etc.," was published posthumously. His influence on American poetry, particularly the confessional school, extends through virtually every poet who followed.