BIOGRAPHY
James Merrill (1926-1995). Born into a wealthy New York family (his father cofounded the Merrill Lynch stockbrokerage firm), Merrill was privately educated at home and then at Amherst College, where he received a B.A. degree in 1947.

His first volume of poems, First Poems (1951), established his reputation as a writer of technical virtuosity, urbane eloquence, and wit. With the more personal and passionate poems of Nights and Days (1966) and Mirabell: Books of Number (1979), both recipients of the National Book Award, Merrill gained a wider and more enthusiastic audience. Merrill is probably most widely known as "The Ouija poet" for his narrative poems that record the Ouija board sessions he and a friend conducted with "spirits from another world."

Merrill has also written plays (The Immortal Husband [1956] and The Bait [1960]) and novels (The Seraglio [1957] and The (Diblos) Notebook [1965]). In 1990, Merrill won the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.