Browse Items (151 total)

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.

Notes on an alternative to the castration scene in James Merrill's "strange coming-of-age" novel.

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…

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.

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.

James Merrill as a boy on a slide. "As a child, Jimmy was always attended by someone...So it's striking that, as an adult, he remembered his childhood as painfully lonely...the loneliness of a young mind engaged with private thoughts of mortality,…

James Merrill letter to Irma Brandeis explaining Psyche's realization in "From the Cupola," the drafts of which he had been sending to her (see also "From the Cupola" draft page).

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.…

Fifteen pages (out of sixty total) ofa corrected typescript draft ofAn Evening at Sandover, Merrill's first stage adaptation of the Ouija board epic, performed as part of the revived Poets' Theatre at Hasty Pudding theater at Harvard. Peter Hooten…