Nonfiction
Familiar Spirits: A Memior of James Merrill and David Jackson
by Alison Lurie
Viking, New York, 2001
- ISBN-10: 0670894591
- ISBN-13: 9780670894598
“'Extraterrestrial' isn't exactly the first word that comes to mind when you hear the name of James Merrill (1926-95), the American poet who during the course of a staggeringly successful 50-year career won two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Bollingen Prize and the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry – to say nothing of a shelfload of other honors and distinctions. But that's what Alison Lurie, in her new memoir of her 40-year friendship with Merrill and his longtime companion, David Jackson, calls him – twice. …but as with the unexpected but brilliant characterization of Merrill with which it opens, it offers a lot of interesting suggestions.”