Russell Edson Papers

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. His father, Gus Edson, was a cartoonist known for the comic strips The Gumps and Dondi. Edson attended the Art Students League in New York City as a teenager, then moved on to the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, and Black Mountain College.

Edson was best known for his surrealist prose poetry, which he began to publish in the 1950s, though he also wrote novels, short stories, music, and a play. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and the 1989 Whiting Award. He was also an accomplished visual artist and a skilled letterpress printer.

Widely referred to as the “godfather of the prose poem in America,” Edson was prolific, publishing more than twenty books, many with his own illustrations, and some of which he printed himself under his Thing Press imprint. Edson’s other works gained wider distribution through the Wesleyan University Press poetry series and the commercial houses of New Directions and Harper and Row. His final book was See Jack (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Edson referred to his unique style of prose poems as “fables.” The poems are recognizable by their strange juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects, in unlikely and fantastic scenarios. They read as absurd or philosophical tales, are short in length, and populated by nameless husbands, wives, children, farmers, animals, foodstuffs, machinery, body parts, vegetables, rocks, or any other imaginable thing.

Banner image credit: Photo of Russell Edson, circa 1960s, photographer unknown