David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-François Millet's sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century and honoring their essential human dignity. Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. He seeks to describe Gruchy—the small Norman village near Cherbourg where Millet grew up—and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, David Middleton served as professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, Distinguished Service Professor, Alcee Fortier Distinguished Professor, and head of the Department of Languages and Literature at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Currently professor emeritus of English at Nicholls, he lives in Thibodaux with his wife, Francine. He has one grown child, a daughter, Anna Marie Middleton Conrad.
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