History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957) Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954) and The Melodramatists (1949). "


Bibliography


Poetry collections
The Image of the Law (1947)
The Vacuum (1955)
The Salt Garden (1955)
Mirrors and Windows (1958)
The Next Room of The Dream: Poems and Two Plays (1962)
The Blue Swallows (1967)
The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968)
Gnomes & Occasions: Poems (1973) University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-226-57252-8
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977) ISBN 978-0-226-57259-8 —winner of the National Book Award Pulitzer Prize and Bollingen Prize
Sentences (1980) ISBN 978-0-226-57262-8
Inside the Onion (1984) ISBN 0-226-57244-7
War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now (1987) ISBN 978-0-226-57243-7
Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems 1961-1991 (1992) ISBN 978-0-226-57263-5
Grace to be Said at the Supermarket


Prose
The Melodramatists (1949)
Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954)
The Homecoming Game (1957)
The Commodity of Dreams and Other Stories (1959)
Journal of the Fictive Life (1965) ISBN 978-0-226-57261-1
Stories Fables and Other Diversions (1971)


Literary Scholarship
The Oak in the Acorn: On Remembrance of Things Past and on Teaching Proust Who Will Never Learn (1987) ISBN 978-0-8071-1385-1. Nemerov served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964 as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976 and two terms as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990.

For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977) he won the National Book Award for PoetryPulitzer Prize for Poetry and Bollingen Prize. Nemerov was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus and father to art historian Alexander Nemerov Professor of the History of Art and American Studies at Stanford University.