May Sarton

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May Sarton (May 3, 1912-July 16, 1995) was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist born in Wondelgem, Belgium. Many of her novels and poems are pellucid reflections of the lesbian experience.

When she published her more openly lesbian novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing in 1965, Sarton feared, rightly, that writing so strongly about lesbianism would lead to a diminution of the previously established value of her work. "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing," she wrote in Journal of Solitude 1973, "to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality . . . ."

She died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995 [1].


Contents

[edit] Poetry books

  • Encounter in April
  • Inner Landscape
  • The Lion and the Rose
  • The Land of Silence
  • In Time Like Air
  • Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine
  • A Private Mythology
  • As Does New Hampshire
  • A Grain of Mustard Seed
  • A Durable Fire
  • Collected Poems, 1930-1973
  • Selected Poems of May Sarton (edited by Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes)
  • Halfway to Silence
  • Letters from Maine
  • Coming Into Eighty (1994) Winner of the Levinson Prize

[edit] Novels

  • The Single Hound
  • The Bridge of Years
  • Shadow of a Man
  • A Shower of Summer Days
  • Faithful are the Wounds
  • The Birth of a Grandfather
  • The Fur Person
  • The Small Room
  • Joanna and Ulysses
  • Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
  • Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare
  • The Poet and the Donkey
  • Kinds of Love
  • As We Are Now
  • Crucial Conversations
  • A Reckoning
  • Anger
  • The Magnificent Spinster
  • The Education of Harriet Hatfield

[edit] Nonfiction

  • I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography
  • Plant Dreaming deep
  • Journal of a Solitude
  • A World of Light
  • The House by the Sea
  • Recovering: A Journal
  • At Seventy: A Journal
  • Writings on Writings
  • After the Stroke
  • May Sarton - A Self-Portrait
  • Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year

[edit] Children's books

  • Punch's Secret
  • A Walk Through the Woods

[edit] External links

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