Growing up in the late 1970s, I knew of Rod McKuen only as a punchline: poet of treacle.

McKuen was then not yet 50; he’d die in 2015.

Now Pittsburgh-based historian and music journalist Barry Alfonso has written the first full-length biography of Rod McKuen. “A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen” is an intriguing book — and, in part, an apology for a phenomenally successful recording artist who might also be the most popular poet ever but who got scant critical respect.

You might recall one of the hit songs McKuen sang and wrote (or co-wrote), like “If You Go Away,” or such bestselling poetry collections as 1967’s “Listen to the Warm.” But as Alfonso demonstrates, there was much more to him. And if nothing else, this concise and engaging book reintroduces readers to a singular American.

McKuen was a Zelig of midcentury cultural moments. He was born in 1933 in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers in Oakland, Calif., and lived an itinerant, quasi-Okie childhood out West. As a young boy, he was beaten and (he claimed) raped. He never knew his father. He spent three years in a juvenile detention home, then became a teenage rodeo rider and — wait for it — a lumberjack, before edging into show biz.

Alfonso locates McKuen’s key traits early in his career: his longing for approval, his gift for marketing and, mostly, his uncanny ability to connect with audiences just as lonesome, lovelorn and ruefully optimistic as him. In the early ‘50s, he was a Bay Area radio personality known as the Lonely Boy. (Colleagues included a then-unknown Phyllis Diller.) He performed on the edges of the Beat movement, took bit roles in Hollywood B-movies and tried folk-singing with a stint in Greenwich Village.

McKuen’s first albums were mishmashes of folk, novelty numbers and mildly steamy spoken-word pieces Alfonso contends were ahead of their time. In the mid-’60s, his self-published poetry sold well enough to land him a contract with Random House. He’d remain a huge star for a decade.

Alfonso highlights perhaps surprising corners of McKuen’s life. He identified as sexually fluid: “I don’t consider myself as being of any particular sexual persuasion,” McKuen told an interviewer in 1972. In the ‘50s, he was a gay rights activist, partied in Hollywood’s gay demimonde, and worked as a hustler in New York City. The book’s secondary characters include Edward Habib, McKuen’s life partner for 50 years. McKuen hit a career low and suffered from depression in the ‘80s before a successful comeback.

Alfonso interviewed numerous McKuen intimates — a major exception being Habib, who died in May 2018. “Voice of the Warm” also draws heavily on McKuen’s own writings and interviews, although Alfonso emphasizes that the poet tended to embellish, even fabricate. And there are some irksome gaps in Alfonso’s narrative: For instance, the biographer, himself a songwriter, provides no details about how McKuen wrote songs — did he even play an instrument? — although he does note that orchestral pieces credited to McKuen were largely the work of other composers.

So, what is McKuen’s legacy? At his commercial peak, he was critically savaged; Dick Cavett mocked him as “America’s most understood poet.” And it’s hard to argue when the guy wrote lines like, “It’s nice sometimes / to open up the heart a little / and let some hurt come in. / It proves you’re still alive.”

Yet McKuen published two dozen books and issued three dozen albums, and his tunes were covered by the likes of Sinatra, Streisand, Nina Simone and Johnny Cash. In 1969, Sinatra released “A Man Alone,” a whole album of McKuen covers.

“His work offered an outstretched hand to the lonely and brokenhearted, to anyone in need of comfort and healing,” Alfonso writes, later adding, “His books of poetry were treated as prayer devotionals by many.” Indeed, McKuen sometimes comes off as a blend of two Pittsburgh native contemporaries. Like Fred Rogers, he was a nonjudgmental, nonsectarian spiritual icon. And like Andy Warhol, he was a workaholic whose almost naifish earnestness veiled his business acumen (although McKuen seems to have battled more inner demons than either man).

Alfonso comes off as a bit more of an advocate for his subject than is ideal for a biographer. But it’s hard to read “Voice of the Warm” and not end up liking Rod McKuen at least a little.

Author Barry Alfonso will read from his Rod McKuen biography on July 12 at 7:30 p.m. at Riverstone Books, 8850 Covenant Ave., McCandless. The reading is free and open to the public.

Bill O’Driscoll is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and arts reporter for 90.5 WESA-FM.

First Published: June 30, 2019, 2:00 p.m.