Familiar Spirits (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Alison Lurie
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Memoirs and literary biography
- Time of Work: 1950 to the present
- Setting: Stonington, Connecticut; Athens, Greece; New York; Key West, Florida
- Principal Characters: James Merrill, David Jackson, Peter Hooten, Alison Lurie
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography
- Subjects: 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, Gay men, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Love or romance, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Literature, Poetry or poets, 1980’s, Novelists, Fortune-telling or fortune-tellers, 1990’s, Occultism or the occult, 2000’s
- Locales: Connecticut, New York, Key West, FL, Athens, Greece
With the nearly concurrent publication of his hefty Collected Poems and Alison Lurie’s slim, gimlet-eyed memoir, James Merrill is very much back in the public consciousness. Readers of the poetry will be reminded again of the rare combination of gifts he displayed with such prodigious ease in sixteen volumes of verse over nearly fifty years: the wit, fluency, and lightness of touch, the unerring mastery of form and cadence, the signature blend of the formal and the casual—autobiographical without being confessional, as critic Helen Vendler once put it. He was from the start a...
[The entire page is 1782 words long]
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