Browse Items (206 total)

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…

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

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…

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.

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…

"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…

A three-page draft of an unfinished, untitled poem from winter 1992 addressing Elizabeth Bishop. It is an "uncharacteristically awkward" but powerful poem about "raw life" prevailing over "graceful art."