Murray Joan Edited Grant Code (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Hardcover - clean, no marks, clean inside, no dj - from a private collection -.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First edition. Forward by W.H. Auden. Small octavo. 148pp. Top corners bumped, slight toning along the top and bottom edges, near fine in a price-clipped, about very good dust jacket, with some rubbing and creasing on the panels, edgewear including a few chips, and some splitting at the flap folds. Inscribed by Joan Murray's mother, Margaret, on the front fly: "To my beloved Billie de Witt - 'My Birthday Twin' - June 8th. In loving memory and gratitude, from Margaret Murray - May 29 / 47." The poet Joan Murray suffered from a congenital heart condition which led to her passing in 1942, at the young age of 24. From "The Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray," published in *The Paris Review*: "Five years after [Joan Murray's] death, out of the blue woodwork of 1947, her first book of poetry was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition with the title *Poems by Joan Murray: 19171942*. W. H. Auden, who had been dissatisfied with the manuscripts he had received as a first-year judge, had reached out to Murray's mother to inquire about the possibility of publishing her daughter's work posthumously for the prize. Murray had been a student in Auden's Poetry and Culture course at the New School in 1940, and her mother countered Auden's invitation with the accusation that he had killed her daughter by inspiring her 'poetry fever.' But she was devoted to her daughter's work and eager to see it published, so agreed to the Yale edition with the condition that her friend Grant Codea poet, Harvard lecturer, and dance and theater criticedit the collection" (February 15, 2018). The first book of W.H. Auden's Yale Series of Younger Poets, with a remarkable inscription from the proud mother of the late, young poet. Joan Murray's work has experienced a renaissance after half a century of being all but forgotten, largely thanks to John Ashbery, who in 2003 published a short appreciation of Murray, "one of the poets of the forties whom I most enjoy." Ashbery wrote the foreword for the 2018 book of Joan Murrays work, *Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems, The Complete Poetry*, published by New York Review Books, following the 2013 discovery of Murray's lost papers.