Memoirs

A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.

Robert Lowell’s Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry.

Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement.

Includes black-and-white photographs

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the renowned and pathbreaking author of many leading works in American poetry, including Life Studies (FSG, 1959), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Day by Day (FSG, 1977).

Steven Gould Axelrod is the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art and Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words; the coauthor of Robert Lowell: A Reference Guide; and the coeditor of the three-volume New Anthology of American Poetry. The president of the Robert Lowell Society, he is a distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

Grzegorz Kosc is the author of Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres and Robert Frost’s Political Body. His writing has been published in Wallace Stevens Journal and Partial Answers, among other journals. He is a professor of English and Director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw.