Browse Items (151 total)

This photo album, entitled "Happy Days at Stonington," includes snapshots taken around James Merrill and David Jackson's home at 107 Water Street, along with colorful commentary.

"Honorary Degree Citations" in the Amherst Alumni News. James Merrill's honorary degree from Amherst was the third for the Merrill family (Charles had received two). Amherst asked James Merrill about collecting his literary papers, which were already…

"Looking at Mummy," Merrill's first poem at age 6, written in his mother's hand (so how much of it she may have written herself remains a question). This experience/poem later influenced “The Broken Home.”

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…

In this popular poem, Merrill reminisces about the summer of 1937, waiting for and then working on a jigsaw puzzle with his governess, Zelly, and her teaching him "her languages." "Lost in Translation" is often cited as Merrill's greatest short poem.…

"Mirror" was published in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. Included here is one typescript among 11 total pages with holograph notes and alternative titles. It was inspired by the Ephraim séances and is commonly held to be Merrill's…

Holograph and typescript fragments toward and three full drafts of "Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker." A play on John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and published in A Scattering of Salts, it is one of the longest poems of…

This fragment is the start of a never-completed novel about James Merrill's and David Jackson's evolving relationship with Stonington and each other.

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.

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.