James Merrill

James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for "Divine Comedies". He won two National Book Awards, for "Nights and Days" (1966) and "Mirabell: Books of Numbers" (1978). His second novel, "The (Diblos) Notebook" was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.
Merrill was born in 1926 in New York City. His family was very rich. His father, Charles Merrill, was an investment banker and co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. He started his higher schooling at Amherst College, where he first met the poet Robert Frost. He was in the U. S. Army from 1944 to 1945. He graduated from Amherst after World War II in 1947.
Merrill's first play, "The Immortal Husband", was done off Broadway in 1955. His first novel, "The Seraglio", was published in 1957.
By using a ouija board, Merrill and his life-long companion David Jackson wrote down messages from other-world spirits. Merrill used these notes in three of his books. These books were printed together as a trilogy in 1982 with a new last part. That book is called "The Changing Light at Sandover".
In his last years, Merrill was sick with AIDS. He died of a heart attack in 1995 while on vacation in Tucson, Arizona.