James Merrill(1926-1995)
- Actor
Merrill won every major literary award, including the Pulitzer ("Divine
Comedies, 1976) and two National Book Awards ("Nights and Days, " 1967
and "Mirabell: Books of Number, " 1978). In addition to poetry he wrote
novels, plays and essays. A memoir titled "A Different Person" came out
in 1993, and his 15th volume of poetry, "A Scattering of Salts, " is
scheduled to be published in March by Alfred A. Knopf. Merrill was born
in New York City in 1926. His father, Charles Merrill, was a founder of
the stock brokerage firm Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and published
in March by Alfred A. Knopf. Pierce, Fenner and Smith. His parents'
divorce in 1939 provided him with a dominant theme throughout his
career. Merrill's first book, "First Poems" (1951), received mixed
reviews, and he turned to fiction and playwriting. His first play, "The
Immortal Husband, " was produced off Broadway in 1955, and his first
novel, "The Seraglio, " was published in 1957. He returned to verse
with "The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace" (1959) and "Water
Street" (1963). In a review in The New Republic, Charles Molesworth
compared Merrill's "Scripts for the Pageant" (1980) to "Yeats and
Blake, if not Milton and Donne." Over the years Merrill's work became
increasingly personal in subject matter, intimate in voice and
colloquial in manner, while remaining highly formal. "His common style
is a net of loose talk tightening to verse, " wrote the critic Denis
Donoghue, "a mode in which anything can be said with grace."