The Oppens: Disability, Disease, and the Authorship of Late Work

Every artist has their last works, but not all are “late works,” as theorized by Edward Said. By revisiting George Oppen’s late poems, I challenge established preconceptions about late-life creativity that have typically emphasized social withdrawal, despair, and finality in his work. Emphasis placed on lateness, I argue, obscures material conditions of textual production, particularly coauthoring literary activities. The Oppens work together to shape a social poetics and model of authoring beyond the normative ideals of self-reliance, especially with Primitive, published when Alzheimer’s disease had all but prevented George from working. The poems and archival evidence of Mary Oppen's editorial work describe the couple's journey through illness and the work's posthumous reinvention as a stylistic artefact.