Archive of 200 acceptance/rejection notes and literary correspondence to poet John Alfred Taylor including Robert Bly, Joseph McElroy, Dave Smith, Mona Van Duyn, John Williams, Thomas Williams, et al.

1980. Very good. We offer for sale an archive of correspondence from the estate of poet and horror-story author John Alfred Taylor, mostly from editors of literary journals from the 1960s to the 1990s. There are about 200 individual notes and letters, mostly in response to Taylor's submissions, but we have also included groups of letters from colleagues and fellow writers, notably the novelists Joseph McElroy and Thomas Williams, author and editor Tim Hildebrand, poet-editors Robert Bly and David Wagoner, et al., which shed light on Taylor's professional, academic and creative concerns and activities. Taylor was an indefatigable sender-out of poetry and eventually published over 400 poems in some of the leading literary journals. He kept a file card for each poem, would write down the journal and date for each submission, and if it was rejected, he would send it right back out again to another journal. On the third floor of his house in Washington, PA, he would toss the rejection and acceptance notes into a box that eventually overflowed onto the floor. We have gathered the best of these — the most well-known editors and most interesting notes — to create an archive of Taylor's activities as an active poet and to craft a portrait of the personalities who oversaw that part of the literary scene back then. Taylor (1931-2023) first began writing verse as a student at the University of Missouri, where he studied with John G. Neihardt. He did graduate work at the University of Iowa and at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, getting a MA in 1957 and a PhD in 1959. He was an instructor at the University of New Hampshire, 1959-62, where he met Thomas Williams and Joseph McElroy, then Assistant Professor at Rice University, 1962-64, Assistant Professor at Buffalo State College, 1964-66, and from 1967 to his retirement an Associate Professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. The Soap Duckets came out in 1965; Waking at Night appeared in 2009. A volume of supernatural fiction, Hell is Murky, was published by Ash-Tree Books in 2008. HIGHLIGHTS; Nasty rejection notes from Robert Bly, long correspondence on publishing, authors, anti-war activism at Madison, etc., with Tim Hildebrand, a substantial tranch of very personal letters from Thomas Williams, a well-known novelist and National Book Award winner, notes from John Williams (author of "Stoner" and "Augustus"), good personal letters from Joseph McElroy (author of "Women and Men"), many notes from David Wagoner and from other well known editors at major literary journals of the time period. We have a complete annotated list we can send on request but the list of authors is: Jonathan Aaron, Marvin Bell, Stephen Berg, Robert Bly, Philip Dacey, John Engels, Jean Farley, Leslie Fiedler, Donald Hall, Tim Hildebrand, George Hitchcock, Judson Jerome, Curt Johnson, George Lanning, Gene Lundahl, Robie Macauley, David Madden, Marvin Malone, Wiliam Matthews, Joseph P. McElroy, Scott Meredith, Robert Mezey, John Frederick Nims, David Ray, Vern Rutsala, Michael Smetzer, Dave Smith, Alexander Taylor, Mona Van Duyn, David Wagoner, Charles Waterman, Tom Wayman, Theodore Weiss, Reed Whittemore, CK Williams, John Williams, and Thomas Williams. Many if not most in their original envelopes and some enclosing clippings, booklets, brochures, flyers, chapbooks, journals. With a substantial group of representative literary magazines in which Taylor's work appeared.