Joseph Brodsky biography

Profile

Joseph Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He was charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labor. The sentence was commuted in 1965. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, he lived thereafter in the United States. He served as U.S. poet laureate 1991–'92. Brodsky died on January 28, 1994, in Brooklyn, New York.