Guide to the Louis O. Coxe Papers, 1959-1975
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Cite as: Louis O. Coxe Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine.
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Louis Osborne Coxe (1918-93) was a scholar, author, poet, and playwright. Born in Manchester, NH, on April 15, 1918, Louis received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1940. He taught English at Brooks School in North Andover, MA (1940-42), but left to serve during World War II. As a lieutenant in the Navy he captained a patrol boat in the Pacific and Caribbean. In 1955 he joined Bowdoin's faculty as Pierce Professor of English. While working at Bowdoin he received two Fulbright grants, studying at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland (1959-60, and Aix Universite Marseille in Provence, France (1971-72). In 1977 he became the 36th poet to be awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. Coxe was the author of The Sea Faring(1947), The Middle Passage(1960), The Last Hero(1965), Nikal Seyn and Decoration Day(1966), Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry(1969), and Birth of a State(1970). He also adapted Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd into a play in 1952.
Louis Coxe married Edith Winsor in Boston on June 28, 1946. He died on May 25, 1993. Surviving, besides his wife, are three sons, Robert W. Coxe, Louis O. Jr., and Charles S. Coxe; and a daughter, Helen C. Cheney.
Collection contains correspondence (1959-78) from friends and from Bowdoin College; there are also typescripts, manuscripts, and notebooks of short poems and narrative poems: The Wreck of the Thresher(1963) by William Meredith Papers, Birth of a State(1970), Decoration Day(1960), Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry(1968), and Nikal Seyn and Decoration Day: A Poem and A Play(1966); and clippings (1968-74) about Coxe and about Ezra Pound.
Correspondence, 1959-1978
The Birth of a State
Decoration Day
Decoration Day, typescript carbon
Decoration Day, typescript carbon
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson, ms. notebook
Nikal Seyn and Decoration Day; a poem and a play, typescript
Nikal Seyn and Decoration Day; a poem and a play, typescript, carbon of Nikal Seyn
Misc. poems in notebook
Misc. typescript copies
Clippings, 1968-1974
Research Questions
Miscellaneous
Poems by Harry George (Class of 1970), 1970, undated