Browse Items (6 total)

Typescript outline and notes for Omensetter’s Luck revised version, March 1954

Autograph [photocopy] notes for James Merrill's reading during "James Merrill: A Life in Writing," sponsored by Washington University Libraries, November 19, 1994. In commemoration of the Modern Literature Collection’s 30th anniversary.

Early holograph notes and drafts toward the poem that would become “18 W 11th St.” The poem regards his childhood NYC home, which was accidentally blown up by radicals living there and making homemade bombs in the basement.

James Merrill's notes on a possible title for the Ouija trilogy, eventually titled "The Changing Light at Sandover."

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…

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