Richard Hugo was a poet of the Pacific Northwest, yet his renown attests to a stature greater than that of most “regional” poets. He grew up in White Center, Washington, outside of Seattle. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean, and this experience informed some of his poems. Hugo studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, where he earned a BA in 1948 and an MA in 1952. After the publication of his first book, A Run of Jacks (1961), he started teaching at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he worked for almost 18 years. Critics have praised Hugo’s technical skills, the emotional impact of his compressed images, and the casual, sometimes humorous tone of his poems. In addition to his major poetry collections—including Selected Poems (1979), 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American (1975), The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), Good Luck in Cracked Italian (1969), Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965), and A Run of Jacks (1961)—Hugo also published a collection of essays, The Triggering Town (1979), and the mystery novel Death and the Good Life (1981). His autobiography was posthumously published as The Real West Marginal Way (1987). His forte, however, was poetry, and his characteristic stance as a self-analytic writer, a perceptive observer, and a Westerner is evident in Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1984).