May Sarton: Among the Usual Days

by May Sarton, Susan Sherman (Editor)

Still writing and growing in her early eighties, May Sarton long ago established a unique niche for herself in twentieth-century American literature: in numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, and personal journals she has created a body of work that is both artistically beautiful and comforting, while always testifying to the importance of courage and love in the survival of the perceptive individual. May Sarton: Among the Usual Days is a treasure trove of her unpublished writing, carefully selected by longtime friend Susan Sherman from almost seventy years of correspondence and journals stored in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, in May Sarton's own files, and in other archives. Thematically arranged, these passages reflect the seasons of her flowering as writer, teacher, daughter, lover, friend, and fiercely independent thinker. Lavishly illustrated with previously unpublished photos of Sarton and her closest companions from her infancy to the present, in May Sarton: Among the Usual Days all of the great abiding themes of her craft recur and expand: her respect for poetic form, hunger for love, appreciation for the centrality of solitude, commitment to enduring friendship, unabashed relish for the natural world in all its aspects, and zeal in pursuit of honesty above all, no matter what the cost. Her canny eye and ear bring alive her encounters with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Eva Le Gallienne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bowen, Andre Malraux, Rebecca West, and Julian and Juliette Huxley. May Sarton: Among the Usual Days is finally a celebration, a cornucopia of earned wisdom and ardent candor that reveals over and again, in Sherman's words, the distinguishedwriter May Sarton's own "sacramentalization of the ordinary."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir

289 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1993

About the author

May Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton boldly came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her later memoir, Journal of a Solitude, was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton died in York, Maine, on July 16, 1995.

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I generally enjoy her work but found this collection of random snippets of letters, lines from poems, journal fragments, etc grouped sort of by topic to be frustratingly boring & generally pointless. There were some nice photos & some interesting information but I don't think anything you wouldn't have gotten from reading her better organized & edited journals or fiction

[Jules · Rating 2 out of 5]

It feels like a betrayal of my deep love of May Sarton to not adore this book, but I don't. The reason rests in how the book is formatted. The volume editor compiled this as a themed scrapbook of Sarton's unpublished letters and other work and gave snippet of themes with no greater symmetry of the excerpted material. The book content had some beautiful quotes and the photos were wonderful glimpses, but overall it felt random and without focus.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

For May Sarton fans.