James Merrill as a baby with his parents, Charles and Hellen. After three weeks in the hospital, Hellen recorded James's weight weekly, through December.
Draft pages from Section P, which is an important section about power and apocalypse that foreshadows the revelations in Mirabell: Book of Numbers and Scripts for the Pageant.
Draft pages of "The Book of Ephraim" Section A, with corrections to the beginning, which addresses James Merrill's uncertainty over the format in which to tell this story. Claude Fredericks had convinced him it had to be in verse.
The Yellow Pages cover mock-up for the paperback edition of this limited edition volume, which compiled uncollected poems composed between 1946 and 1971. The book was published in cloth (50 copies) and paperback editions (750-800 copies) by Temple…
A script for James Merrill's play, "The Immortal Husband," an update of the classical myth of Aurora and Tithonus. Included here are twenty of a total sixty-five manuscript pages.
These are the only surviving remnants of James Merrill's attempted Ouija board novel, in a folder labeled "Lost 70's Novel," in Merrill's hand. After losing two different prose drafts of the novel, he decided to write a verse narrative instead, which…
National Book Award Acceptance Speech for Merrill's first NBA, for Nights and Days. There was a sideshow at that year's ceremony, with a large group in the audience walking out in protest of the Vietnam war when Hubert Humphrey spoke.
“A la Recherche du temps perdu: Impressionism in Literature” was James Merrill's senior thesis on Proust from Amherst, 1946. At 106 pages, it is by far Merrill's longest piece of literary criticism and his most scholarly production. Merrill…