Browse Items (206 total)

Autograph and typescript drafts of "Self-Portrait in Tyvec Windbreaker" by James Merrill.

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.

Program for "T.S. Eliot: A Centennial Appraisal" sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis, September 30-October 2, 1988. Featured speakers included James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Amy Clampitt, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Gjertrud…

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.

"The Poet: Private" in Saturday Review, featuring the poem "Yannina" and an interview with literary critic and good friend, David Kalstone. They discuss "Yannina," a poem about coming to terms with the past, and dedicated to Stephen Yenser. In the…

Notebook pages showing the first title of and early notes toward the pivotal, experimental, multifaceted poem "The Thousand and Second Night," which was based partly upon Merrill's Bell's palsy experience. These notes capture Merrill's uncertainty…

Autograph and typescript draft for "The Victor Dog" by James Merrill.

"The Will," published in Divine Comedies, contains the first mention of Ephraim in a poem, as well as the first time he speaks. In it, Ephraim explains why the novel draft was lost twice--implying that he was involved.

"Tony: Ending the Life," published in A Scattering of Salts, is an "expansive elegy for his friend" (Tony Parigory, who died in summer 1993 of AIDS), "and (it is all but explicit) himself." Merrill had been largely silent about his AIDS diagnosis but…