May Sarton (1912–1995) AIDS, The Silence Now LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY May Sarton (1912–1995) Born in Belgium, Sarton was brought to the United States in 1916 and became a naturalized citizen in 1924. She was educated at various private schools, including the Cambridge High and Latin School. In 1929, the year her first poems were published, she turned down a scholarship to Vassar College to become an apprentice with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York. In 1936, when the Associated Actors Theatre, which she directed, disbanded, Sarton began to devote herself to writing. Her prolific output of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction brought her many honors, including appointment as a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry (1954–1955) and awards from the Poetry Society of America (1952), the Johns Hopkins University Poetry Festival (1961), the Before Columbus Foundation (1985), and the Women's Building/West Hollywood Conexxus Women's Crisis Center (1987). She has taught widely in American colleges and universities and is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorate degrees. She is the author of eighteen novels, among them The Single Hound (1938), Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), and The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989). Her volumes of poetry include Encounter in April (1937), Collected Poems: 1930–1973 (1974), The Silence Now: New and Uncollected Earlier Poems (1988), and Coming into Eighty (1994). In 1986, Sarton suffered a stroke. In describing her difficult recuperation, she remarked to an interviewer that since her illness, her poems explore "where I am now, as a woman...who has really faced growing old for the first time."