ABSTRACT
Readers of Wallace Stevens are often aware of his first eighteen years in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was born, his three years as a special student at Harvard, and his long affiliation with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in Hartford, Connecticut, where he eventually became a vice president and lived and worked until his death in 1955. Perhaps too easily and too often we glide over the crucial sixteen years, from 1900 to 1916, when he lived in New York—including the nine years prior to his marriage to Elsie Viola Kachel and the first seven years thereafter. (I omit the year when, still in primary school, he lived in Brooklyn with the family of an uncle and attended a Lutheran school there.) New York was Stevens’ first “home” in his postcollegiate years, and his life in the city formed him, for better or for worse, during the impressionable years beginning when he was twenty and continuing until his move from the city at the age of thirty-six. It is not as if those years are blank pages in his personal history: we have his journal beginning with the Harvard years and continuing, for the most part, until his letters to his fiancée gradually replaced the journal. And the 272 preserved letters to Elsie, almost all of them composed before the marriage, are now available in Donald Blount’s edition. We know many of the books he purchased, read, and marked during these years. One could say that we know more about the Stevens of the New York years than any other comparable period of his life.
