David Noyes Jackson

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

David Noyes Jackson
Authors James Merrill and David Jackson at home in Athens, Greece, October 1973.
Born	(1922-09-16)September 16, 1922
Died	July 13, 2001(2001-07-13) (aged 78)
Occupation	Writer, artist
Nationality	American
Notable works	'The Changing Light at Sandover, (collaborator and 'medium')
Partner	James Merrill

David Noyes Jackson (September 16, 1922 – July 13, 2001) was the life partner of poet James Merrill (1926–1995).

Life[]

A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill's play, "The Bait." They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut,^[1] Key West, Florida, and Athens, Greece. "It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew," wrote Alison Lurie,^{[citation needed]} who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).

Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill's and Jackson's ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in The Book of Ephraim (printed for the first time in Divine Comedies, 1976, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977).

Many critics consider Jackson to be a kind of co-writer, certainly the catalyst if not the medium, for much of James Merrill's most significant poetic output.^{[citation needed]} (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and (1980) were all written with Jackson's assistance. Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page apocalyptic poem published in its entirety in 1982.

He and James Merrill are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington. Jackson's former wife and Merrill's friend, Doris Sewell Jackson is buried behind them.

Gallery[]

• 

  James Merrill and David Jackson House, Key West, Florida

• 

  Jackson and Merrill graves, Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut

References[]