Extent:

12.93 Linear Feet

Scope and content:

This series covers the years 1944-1988, but excludes letters written for or to The Banyan Press (1947-1950). Those can be found in The Banyan Press Archive 900230A. Personal letters from James Merrill, 1952-1988, have been moved to the Claude Fredericks Journal and Letters archive 900230C, where Claude Fredericks's Journal and his own outgoing letters are kept. Note that letters to Fredericks are also on some of the postcards sent to Fredericks from Carl Van Vechten in the late 1940s and early 1950s (900230B Box 47).

The letters in this series are from family members, many of the poets and writers represented in The Banyan Press archive, and, after 1961, Fredericks's colleagues at Bennington College (for example, Stephen Sandy, Nicholas Delbanco, Bernard Malamud, Ben Belitt, Lawrence Alloway, Camille Paglia), and many of his students (for example, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Waldman, Roger Kimball). Other correspondents include May Sarton, Evelyn Hofer, Anaïs Nin, Julian Beck, John Berryman, Alfonso Ossorio, Wallace Stevens, Alice B. Toklas, Dollie Pierre Chareau, and Thomas Merton.

In the list that follows the name of every correspondent in any given year from 1944 to 1958 is given only once for that year. Sometimes this means that this letter is the only letter received from that correspondent in the entire year, but it may also mean that this letter is the first of several or even of many in that year. From 1959 on the writer of every letter as it occurs in any given folder is listed. Names in parentheses after names listed help identify by association obscure correspondents. X indicates a missing or unknown name.

At this time, letters have been identified only through May 1963.

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