Robert A. Wilson - Marianne Moore collection

American poet and editor Marianne Moore (1887-1972) is best known for her modernist style, use of syllabics, and her love for baseball and strange animals, which were often topics of her poetry. Moore served as the editor of the literary magazine The Dial from 1925 to 1929.

Moore was born in 1887 and was raised solely by her mother; her father had been committed to a mental hospital for a nervous breakdown before her birth. She attended Bryn Mawr College, graduated in 1909, and went on to teach at the U.S. Industrial Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the New York City Library in Manhattan before her success as a poet allowed her to write full time. Moore's poems first appeared in European and American periodicals and her talent was encouraged by fellow modernists H. D., Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Elliot. In 1925, she became the editor of the literary magazine The Dial and held the position until the magazine's dissolution in 1929. Moore was awarded the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953 for her Collected Works (1951). She continued to write new poetry throughout her career, but she was also known for rewriting and republishing already-published poems. Moore was a longtime and much-beloved resident of Brooklyn, New York, and an active participant in New York's literary scene, where she cut a distinctive figure in her signature ensemble of a long black cape and tricorn hat. Moore suffered several strokes in 1968, which marked the end of her prodigious literary career. Moore died on February 5, 1972, and the majority of her papers and her entire library were bequeathed to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where the permanent installation of Moore's Greenwich Village living room and library can be seen.

"Marianne (Craig) Moore."Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Literature Resource Center. Accessed June 27, 2011.

American bibliographer, bookseller, and collector Robert A. Wilson was born in 1922. For many struggling writers and poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, Wilson was a familiar presence. As proprietor of the Phoenix Book Shop in New York City from 1962 until the store closed in 1988, Wilson provided both encouragement and financial support to many writers.

The Phoenix Book Shop was known for its selection of books by the avant-garde and contemporary writers of the 1950s and 1960s, stocking works by Edward Albee, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Michael McClure. Wilson's shop also specialized in modern first editions and literary manuscripts of writers such as W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding Jackson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Dylan Thomas.

Through the bookshop, Wilson published the work of many notable writers, including Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Wilbur. During his twenty-six year tenure as the proprietor of the Phoenix, Wilson oversaw the publication of no fewer than forty-three volumes. Wilson himself was the author of bibliographies of Gregory Corso (1966), Denise Levertov (1972), and Gertrude Stein (1974, revised 1994), and works on the book trade and book collecting, such as Faulkner on Fire Island (1979), Modern Book Collecting (1980), The Phoenix Book Shop: A Nest of Memories (1997), and Seeing Shelley Plain (2001).