Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was one of America's great postwar poets. Born in Oakland, he began writing poetry as a teenager in Bakersfield and attended University of California, Berkeley for two years. One of the major figures in the San Francisco Renaissance, Duncan is often identified with Donald Allen's landmark anthology The New American Poetry and the Black Mountain poets. His books include Letters: Poems 1953-1956, The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, among many other works.