Marilyn Monroe: Bibliophile

Booktryst has a piece about Marilyn Monroe, the reader and book collector.

A brief from that story...

She had a personal library of over 400 books. She loved James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and poet Heinrich Heine. Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg were literary heroes. Truman Capote and Isak Dinesen were friends. And she was married to playwright Arthur Miller.

Vanity Fair has a piece about Marilyn Monroe, the writer.

From that piece...

Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.

Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.

Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.