Peter Klappert was born in 1942 and grew up in Rowayton, Connecticut. He is the author of several collections of poems including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket, which was selected by Stanley
Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty was first published in 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf. For many years Klappert has taught in the Graduate Writing
Program at George Mason University. He lives in Apollo Beach, Florida, and in Washington D.C.
An artistic triumph...Klappert's book offers a tribute to Paris and its people in the bright, feverish period just before World War II...---David Kirby, Library Journal
For all its strangeness---because of it!---The Idiot Princess succeeds. Klappert has taken on a most daring and difficult conceit in order to hurl new tonal possibilities our way...If the
poet's job is to invigorate the speech of the tribe, then here is a poet who is earning his keep.---Sven Birkerts, Electric Life
Among other things, The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty is a consummate piece of ventriloquism. Only Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow has reproduced with the same authenticity the
European slang, politics, popular entertainment, brand names, hopes, and anxieties of this World War II epoch...Not only has [Klappert's] ambition been vast but his achievement has also been
distinguished. The Idiot Princess is a final and original expression of the very modernism the war brought to an end.---Edmund White, The New Republic
