Preferred Citation:	Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Frederick Seidel Papers (Manuscript Collection MS-54152).
	Acquisition:	Purchase, 2019 (19-08-001-P)
	Processed by:	Amy E. Armtsrong, 2022

Repository:

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

	Frederick Seidel was born on 19 February 1936, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Jerome Jay and Thelma (née Cartun) Seidel. Seidel's paternal grandparents came to the United States from Russia and his grandfather, Samuel, ran a junk and scrap metal business in St. Louis. Seidel's family was Jewish, and although not especially observant, Seidel occasionally attended synagogue with his father and uncles. Seidel's father owned a mine in West Virginia, and co-owned Seidel Coal and Coke Company with his brother Maurice.
	The successful family businesses offered a comfortable living, and Seidel attended the private St. Louis Country Day School. In his later high school years, his mother was treated for mental illness, and between 1951 and 1952, she resided at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and later in 1952 at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut.
	Believing he would be a writer, Seidel began writing poems long before he graduated from high school. In 1953, he left St. Louis to attend Harvard University, where during his freshman year, he sent a note to poet Ezra Pound, then confined in St. Elizabeth's Hospital. The note stated "If it's worth your while, it's certainly worth mine. Meaning I'd like to visit you." Seidel visited Pound daily for a week that November.
	During his sophomore year, Seidel enrolled in a writing class of American poet and writer Archibald MacLeish, who in February 1955, arranged for Seidel to take a leave of absence from Harvard to travel to Paris, then England, where he met with T. S. Eliot. After a year, Seidel returned to Harvard and graduated in June 1957.
	During this period, Seidel wrote book reviews for Louisville's The Courier-Journal and had individual poems published in various journals and magazines including The Atlantic (1960), Evergreen Review (1962), Hudson Review (1962), Metamorphosis (1961), and The Paris Review (1961). Seidel has said that his early poems were influenced by both Milton and Robert Lowell; and after interviewing Lowell for The Paris Review (1961), he became a friend and mentor to Seidel. In June 1960, Seidel married Radcliffe College graduate Phyllis Munroe Ferguson and the two lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, until 1961 when they moved to Paris and he became editor of The Paris Review.
	In 1961, Seidel submitted a collection of poems for the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center's inaugural Helen Burlin Memorial Award, which included publication of the winning manuscript by Atheneum Press. The judges, Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, and Louise Bogan, unanimously selected Seidel's collection from more than 200 submissions; however, the Center delayed announcing the winner. Seidel learned that he had won, but that the Center was concerned that the book would upset and offend because of poems seen as obscene, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, as well as libelous to Mamie Eisenhower and Cardinal Spellman. In order to award the prize, the 92nd Street Y directors asked Seidel to remove the offending poems, including "Wanting to Live in Harlem," which he refused to do, therefore the Y withdrew the prize. Several notable people associated with the Poetry Center resigned and the three judges launched a public protest against his censorship. Fearing a libel suit, Atheneum Press wavered but ultimately agreed to publish only if Seidel removed or altered the relevant poems, which he refused to do.
	After reading the manuscript, Random House editor Jason Epstein approved its publication, despite head Bennett Cerf's apprehensions, leading to Seidel's first published collection, Final Solutions (1963). The book received mixed reviews and did offend. Of his poetry, Seidel said "I like writing disagreeable poems, or certainly don't mind if a poem strikes someone as unpleasant. It is possible to offend people still, and my poems not infrequently do. One way to do it is to write beautifully what people don't want to hear."
	By 1963, the Seidels were living in New York City and the couple had daughter, Felicity, in 1964 and son, Samuel, in 1966. Although individual works were published in magazines such as Poetry (1965) and Partisan Review (1964, 1966, 1969), Seidel struggled with writing poems in the 17 years between Final Solutions and his second book Sunrise (1979). He tried renting an office in the same building where writers Norman Mailer and Frank Conroy had offices, but still had many diversions. Seidel also taught English at Rutger's University from 1967 to 1970 and from 1972 to 1974.
	In June 1969, Seidel and Phyllis divorced. Now living alone, he refocused on writing and in this second period of creativity established his voice. The poems that became his Sunrise (1980) "were written very slowly, and endlessly polished" and won him the 1979 Lamont Poetry Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
	It was by accident that Seidel began working on film projects. He was friends with filmmakers Mark Peploe and his sister Clare, wife of director and screenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci. Mark Peploe asked Seidel to read and rewrite a script he was having trouble with and this formed a creative partnership that lasted over several years with projects including Afraid of the Dark and Victory (adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel).
	After this period of screenwriting, Seidel focused almost exclusively on poetry. After almost ten years between Sunrise and publication of his third collection These Days (1989), his publication pace increased and he released a string of books every few years, including 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist Going Fast. A major project was the commission from the board of the American Museum of Natural History to commemorate the opening of their new planetarium. This led to the Cosmos Poems (2000). He also received a commission from The Wall Street Journal to produce a poem a month on any subject titled with the name of the month. For two and half years, Seidel did and these poems became Life on Earth (2001) and Area Code 212 (2002). In 2006, Ooga-Booga was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Following this success, Seidel has published five more volumes of poetry as of 2022, including Peaches Goes It Alone (2018).

	The papers of modern American poet Frederick Seidel consist of drafts of published and unpublished poems, proofs for published poetry collections, film scripts and treatments, personal and professional correspondence, notebooks, photographs and slides, clippings, and family papers which document Seidel's writing career and personal life. The papers are arranged in five series: I. Works, 1955-2019, undated; II. Correspondence, circa 1950-2019; III. Personal and Professional Papers, circa 1960-2018; IV. Photographs, circa 1936-2000s; V. Papers Belonging to Others, 1951-2016.
	The arrangement of the materials closely reflects Seidels's own organization of his papers, as received at the Ransom Center. Where Seidel provided a meaningful label for a grouping of material, that wording is used in the container list and is indicated in single quotation marks.
	Series I. Works forms the bulk of the material and consists of 22 document boxes, one oversized box, and one galley file of poem drafts, proofs and related material for published collections, serials containing Seidel's works, scripts and treatments, and other drafts. The works are arranged into seven subseries: A. 'Early manuscripts,' 1955-circa 1980s, undated; B. Individual Poems, circa 1981-2019, undated; C. Poetry Collections, 1963-2019, undated; D. Serials with Seidel's Poems, 1960-2018; E. Film Projects, 1979-2003, undated; F. Book Reviews, Essays, 1959-2017, undated; G. Notebooks, circa 1960s-2000s, undated.
	A. 'Early Manuscripts' were mostly written before the 1963 collection Final Solutions and in between that and the 1989 Sunrise. Poems are in their original order with titles taken from the original hanging files. The files are in rough chronological order, in as much as that can be determined, to maintain approximate dates and distinguish these poems from later poems in Subseries B. Staples and paper clips were removed during processing by Ransom Center staff, but these groupings are maintained using paper sleeves. It is evident from the way that some groupings were stapled together that individual sheets were torn out of the grouping at some point by Seidel.
	The "Levy poems" and "other early poems" were written at approximately the same time based on the addresses typed on some poems. There are multiple drafts of these poems and many of these appear in Final Solutions; in most cases, with a different title. The Index of Works at the end of this finding aid contains unlisted poem titles.
	B. Individual Poems is comprised mostly of published poem drafts, with some poems' publication status unclear. Very few poems are dated, so the date that appears in the container list is an estimate based on contextual information and publishing history.
	Of his writing practice and preference for using a computer Seidel said, "I revise endlessly, and print the poem as it progresses hundreds of times. How the lines look, how the stanzas look to the eye, is an important part of weighing them, hearing them, getting them to balance properly" (Paris Review interview, 2009). The papers certainly reflect this process, as there are numerous drafts (and multiple copies) with varying versions that Seidel reworked and revised extensively. It is sometimes difficult to discern the various versions as related workings of the same poem because Seidel used similar lines across poems; added, removed, and reordered stanzas (thus changing the first and last lines); and gave a particular poem and/or versions numerous different working titles—and sometimes a different version, the same title. This is particularly true for longer poems, such as the poems published as "Modigliani," "Abusers," and "Paris, 1960" in Peaches Goes It Alone; "Moto Poeta" in Nice Weather; and the versions of "My Suicide" (undetermined final title and publication status). Although these poems were not foldered and stacked together, the frequency of different words capturing similar ideas and the drafts' physical proximity to one another suggests these were considered working versions of the final poem. As a result, the various versions most similar to one another were placed in white paper sleeves and those sleeves combined in a folder bearing the title of the published poem.
	For example, there are approximately 16 different working titles for the drafts listed for the published poem "Abusers." This segment contains different groupings, or versions, of poems with similar lines, but often with different titles (though sometimes the different versions have the same title). For these reasons and since all of these various iterations were in proximity to each other in the loose stack, they have been grouped together and identified with what came to be "Abusers."
	In the container list, all given titles are listed and if the poem was published, that title is in bold type. Often the drafts do not contain the published title and were identified by comparison to published poems. Those titles are also in bold but surrounded by brackets.
	Many drafts have lines that suggest the page was folded into quarters. Seidel has said in an interview that he often carries a working poem around with him in his pocket. Individual poems frequently have jottings, phone numbers, etc. written on them and/or on the back of the page; especially the ones that were folded for carrying in pockets, etc.
	An envelope labeled 'Miscellaneous Poems After Peaches' were written after the publication of Seidel's 2018 collection entitled Peaches Goes It Alone. These poems include: My Suicide; The Dance; Writer; Roya; Eliot House, Harvard; Moxifloxacin; The Philosopher Seneca's Repeatedly Botched Suicide; and The Poem of Colored Only. Since there were many copies of some of these same poems loose or in an envelope labeled with that title, these poems were added to the existing file within the individual poems.
	At the end of this series are various untitled pages that contain lines that could not be identified. They are listed as "Untitled" along with the first line. Some of these may be fragments of other poems or individual poems.
	Subseries C. Poetry Collections includes publication material for the majority of Seidel's published poetry collections and may include final manuscripts, the setting copy, as well as various page proof iterations. The earliest are the galley proofs produced by Atheneum Press for Final Solutions and all of the proofs for the latest to date Peaches Goes It Alone (2018). Volumes that aren't represented by manuscripts or proofs are Area Code 212 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), The Cosmos Trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), Going Fast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), My Tokyo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), Poems: 1959-1979 (Knopf, 1989), and These Days (Knopf, 1989).
	In addition, Seidel frequently bound pre-publication copies of collections (sometimes with a different title) and gave them to friends. Many of these are present including one given to Seidel's long-time companion Mac Griswold.
	Subseries D. Serials with Seidel's Poems is an incomplete collection of the magazines and journals where Seidel's poems appeared; sometimes for the first time in publication. The oldest and possibly first published poem to reach a wide audience is "The Love Letter" published in The Atlantic Monthly (1960). Many of the editions of the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books are brittle and fragile. Extreme care is required when handling.
	Subseries E. Film Projects includes synopsis, treatments, and scripts for screenplays Seidel wrote or contributed to, often with frequent partner Mark Peploe and his sister Clare Peploe. Two films that were produced and represented by drafts are Afraid of the Dark (Directed by Mark Peploe, 1991) and Victory (Directed by Mark Peploe, 1996). Scripts for the screenplay Out of the Blue are not dated, but are in an estimated order of creation.
	Subseries F. Book Reviews, Essays contains possibly the earliest published writing by Seidel in the form of book reviews for the Louisville, Kentucky newspaper The Courier-Journal. Most short works in this series are represented by the published version with few manuscript drafts. Some of the proposed works never advanced past the planning stage or the publication status is unknown, so only story ideas and research exist for them.
	Subseries G. Notebooks is comprised of nine notebooks, all undated. Most include jottings, travel notes, contacts and phone numbers, and some unidentified poem fragments and verses. The notebook in folder 22.4 contains a handwritten draft of the poem "Lisbon."
	Series II. Correspondence is relatively small in volume filling approximately two document boxes. It is divided into two subseries: A. Incoming to Seidel from Others, circa 1950-2019 and B. Outgoing from Seidel to Others, 1961-1987. The incoming letters are mostly personal from friends and family, as well as fellow writers, and some professional acquaintances. If there is more than one letter from a correspondent, they have been filed alphabetically within an individual folder. Letters from companions include Mac Griswold and Jill Fox and from Seidel's mother, Thelma, while she was living away from home and receiving treatment for mental illness. Other such correspondents include authors and editors such as Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., Sallie Bingham, Olga Andreyev Carlisle, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, Karl Miller, Richard Poirier, Enzo Siciliano, Amanda Smeltz, C.K. Williams; actress Charlotte Rampling; Guyana-born British artist Frank Bowling; Judge Charles P. Sifton.
	If there is only one letter from a correspondent, they appear in an alphabetical span. For example, a letter from Leonard Bernstein is in the A-F folder. Such correspondents include authors and editors Louis Begley, Harold Brodkey, Peter Buckman, Carmela Ciuraru, Philip Connors, T. S. Eliot, Bruce Hainley, Anthony Hecht, Jonathan Kozol, James Laughlin, Janet Malcolm, Barbara Milton, Selden Rodman, Philip Schultz, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Taylor, Hugo Williams; filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci; composer Leonard Bernstein; photographer Lucinda Bunnen; philanthropist Phoebe Franklin; playwright Arthur Kopit; artists Clotilde Peploe and Maro Gorky; composer Allen Shawn; Presidential advisor Maurice Sonnenberg.
	Subseries B. Outgoing Correspondence includes a small number of letters and postcards to Seidel's father, Jay, some of which are from 1961 when Seidel was living in Paris. A 1969 letter to Seidel's wife, Phyllis, while he was in California discusses the movie business, Paul Sylbert and Dick Sylbert, John Phillips from the Mamas & the Papas, Ines Folger, and visiting a church while in San Francisco. In a 1972 letter to companion Jill Fox (known as "Iz," but in this letter addressed to "Coco"), Seidel explains the origins of his poem "What One Must Contend With" and gives her the first handwritten notes, as well as multiple handwritten and typed drafts.
	Series III. Personal and Professional includes documents relating to Seidel's career and personal life and comprises approximately eight and a half document boxes and one custom box containing a razor. It is ordered alphabetically by theme or topic and contains several address books, articles about Seidel, a relatively small amount of book reviews, calendars (see also the financial section of this series, as Seidel filed some calendars with his yearly income files in order to track business expenses), documents related to his sister and children, pets, passports, and subject files or collected material. Many of these files contain research for writing projects or related to his personal interests. The motorcycle file provides a small sample of material related to Seidel's passion with motorcycles, especially those manufactured by Ducati. A small amount of financial records dating from the 1990s and early 2000s are present. Tax returns, credit card annual reports, and checkbook registers are restricted for the life of Seidel. Additionally, there is a small amount of writings and artistic works given to Seidel by friends or collected by him for some purpose.
	Series IV. Photographs makes up approximately two document boxes and two oversized boxes and contains the earliest portraits and casual snapshots of Seidel as a child from 1936. Headshots and portraits by professional photographers that were used for promotional purpose are included and are arranged in alphabetical order by photographer. A small amount of family portraits (some without Seidel in the photo) include Seidel's daughter Felicity and son Sam as children, his sister Ruth's doctoral graduation, and the last family snapshots of his mother Thelma. There is a large volume of family snapshots and slides that depict casual gatherings, birthdays, parties, vacations and travel, and family dogs. These are in order by approximate date. As Seidel rarely, if ever, attended formal literary events or readings, there are no photographs depicting these activities. A photo album dating from the 1970s to the 1990s contains snapshots, postcards, and programs. These items were left on the original pages, but those pages have come loose from the album cover and require special handling when accessed.
	Series V. Papers Belonging to Others are materials related to Seidel, but collected by others, which he acquired at a later date. There are approximately one and a half boxes of material. Subseries A. Jill Fox, 1972-2016, undated are papers from Isabel W. Fuller Fox (known as Jill to friends). Fox is a companion of Seidel's and the two have known each other since approximately the 1970s. She collected material about or received material from Seidel related to his writing career such as clippings, published poems, and manuscripts. Fox recorded the date on most of the manuscripts and they are arranged by decade based upon that date. Fox was married to Random House editor Joe Fox (whose authors included Truman Capote, John Irving, Peter Matthiessen) and one group of manuscripts is inscribed "For Jill and Joe." A related item is a color snapshot of Fox and Truman Capote at his Black and White Ball in 1966. During the 1980s, Fox became a pen pal and friend to Seidel's father, Jay, and the two exchanged frequent letters. This subseries contains his letters to Fox and in them he discusses his daily life, Seidel's life and career, and other contemporary topics. Subseries B. Jerome Jay Seidel, 1951-1992 is his father's and family papers likely acquired by Seidel after his death in 1985. As stated, Jay Seidel was pen pal to Seidel's companion Jill Fox, and this subseries contains her letters to him and in them she discusses her activities, her art, her family, Fred Seidel's life and career, as well as his children, and other contemporary topics.
	There are also a small number of files related to Seidel's mother Thelma, while living in two private residential treatment centers during the 1950s. The Menninger Clinic (1951-1952) file includes financial statements and treatment updates. The Institute of Living (1952-1954) file includes financial statements, treatment updates, a letter from Frederick Seidel to Thelma expressing his frustration with her absence from the family, letters from friends about visiting or contacting her, insurance documents, and travel ephemera from visits made by Jay Seidel. A large amount of the communication is related to requesting funds to pay for extra activities, services, food and treats, and supplies for Thelma.
	An additional file is regarding the trust for Thelma Seidel's care during the early 1990s. It includes case management notes related to financial matters and issues in daily life.

Other Ransom Center collections with materials related to Frederick Seidel include the Elizabeth Hardwick Papers, the Anne Sexton Papers, and the Robert Lowell Papers.

Unpublished, non-commercial audio recordings were transferred to the Ransom Center's Sound Recordings and Electronic Records Collections. They are cataloged in a separate database.

	People
		Griswold, Mac K.
		Seidel, Frederick, 1936- .
	Subjects
		American poetry.
		Censorship--United States.
		Motorcycles.
		Poets, American--20th century.
		Poets, American--21st century.
		Screenwriters.
		Women--Mental health.
	Places
		New York (N.Y.)
		Saint Louis (Mo.)
	Document Types
		Calendars (documents).
		Clippings.
		Color slides.
		Contracts.
		Correspondence.
		Financial records.
		Manuscripts.
		Notebooks.
		Photographs.
		Poems.
		Screenplays.
		Treatments (documents).