Randall Jarrell's Letters

Randall Jarrell's Letters:
An Autobiographical and Literary Selection
(Expanded Edition)

Edited by Mary Jarrell

Assisted by Stuart Wright
and Stephen Burt

576 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

22 b&w illustrations

Paper ISBN 0-8139-2153-8 • $27.50

In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable letters adds another dimension of friendship, artistry, and intellect to a collection already noted for its behind-the-scenes glimpse of twentieth-century American literary history in the making.

"Witty, often brilliantly perceptive, often touching, usually funny, [these letters] have many of the best qualities of Randall Jarrell's criticism and his comic novel, Pictures from an Institution. They bristle with ideas while they also show great freshness and openness to experience. . . . Of recent collections of letters, only Flannery O'Connor's seem to me to rival these in their consistently high level of interest and entertainment."
—Washington Post Book World

"Randall Jarrell—poet, critic, daimon—was an Enthusiast. Wedding an intense devotion to Old World culture with the frequent exhibition of glad American anarchy, he was Matthew Arnold at the wheel of an MG, tach up, top down, the wind in his literary hair."
—Boston Globe

"Mary Jarrell . . . has written witty and observant connecting passages that shape the book into a rounded narrative and . . . has unveiled Randall Jarrell's final enduring literary work. And in doing so, she has created her own."
—Charlotte Observer

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell was equally at home with the sublime and the quotidian, as amply displayed in his letters, including ones to Peter Taylor newly printed here