Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist.
The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in a
Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father
was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as
an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who
would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light
verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the
subject and setting of much of her later work.
Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that
is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist
and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American
poets.