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Among the James Merrill papers are numerous pages recording Merrill's attempts to fashion poetic lines from prescribed sets of letters. These combinatorial texts include several anagrams and variations on the names of celebrities, friends, and even…

In poems expressed as party invitations, birthday sentiments, holiday wishes, love notes, get-well cards, epithalamia, postcards, and accompaniments to gifts, James Merrill brought verse into everyday life. These occasionals commemorate stilled…

In his 1960 introduction to an exhibit catalog on the painter Corot, James Merrill wrote, “The writer will always envy the painter.” This interest in the relationship between literature and the visual arts emerges years later in the poem…

While he earned his literary reputation on the strength of his many works in verse, James Merrill also carried on a long and intimate relationship with the genre of narrative prose. As a reader, he generally preferred novels to poems, and admired,…

"Dear Jamie," Alice Toklas wrote Merrill in the mid-1950s, discussing his play The Bait which he had recently sent her, "what fascinates me is the underlying question"—here she corrects herself, "or rather fact," only to correct herself again, "or…

First edition, sixteenth printing of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. This prompt book was used for the landmark 1975 Berlin production of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller-Theater that Beckett himself directed. Copiously marked up by Rick…

Program for "Endgame" performed by the Cherry Lane Theatre and directed by Alan Schneider, January 28, 1958. This was the American premiere of "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett.

Photograph of James Dickey as Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard University by Elsa Dorfman, June 1970.

Autograph and typescript drafts of "An Essay at War" collected in A Book of Resemblances by Robert Duncan.

Galley proof of Medea at Kolchis by Robert Duncan