Truman Capote and Isak Dinesen were friends.Īnd she was married to playwright Arthur Miller.įragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, will be published October 12th by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg were literary heroes. She loved James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and poet Heinrich Heine. She had a personal library of over 400 books. Marilyn Monroe: Avid Reader, Writer & Book Collector

And books were a refuge and a companion for Marilyn during her bouts of insomnia.” In these newly discovered diary entries and poems, Marilyn reveals a young woman for whom writing and poetry were lifelines, the ways and means to discover who she was and to sort through her often tumultuous emotional life. If some photographers thought it was funny to pose the world’s most famously voluptuous ‘dumb blonde’ with a book-James Joyce! Heinrich Heine!-it wasn’t a joke to her. In another photograph, she’s on a pulled-out sofa bed reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her, for Life, at home, dressed in white slacks and a black top, curled up on her sofa, reading, in front of a shelf of books-her personal library, which would grow to 400 volumes. Eve Arnold photographed her for Esquire magazine in a playground in Amagansett reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. “Several photographs taken of Marilyn earlier in her life-the ones she especially liked-show her reading. Upon the release of Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters in 2010, Sam Kashner wrote in Vanity Fair: Benjamin Spock, and one guide to flower arranging. She also had a number of books that spoke to a more domestic life, including The Joy of Cooking, Baby & Child Care by Dr. Arthur Miller always had her nose in.Īccording to OpenCulture, when Monroe died in 1962 she left around 400 books behind, “many of which were later catalogued and auctioned off by Christie’s in New York City.” Now on LibraryThing you can get a look at 262 of those books-her collection included Ulysses by James Joyce, Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie, The Roots Of American Communism by Theodore Draper (a risky title to keep around given that whole FBI thing), The Bible, How To Travel Incognito by Ludwig Bemelmans, The Little Engine That Could, and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Even a dip in the shallow end of Monroe’s candid video footage and photo archives will show you that side of her, and now you can see what books the former Mrs. There are plenty of photos showing Marilyn Monroe in her glamorous Hollywood attire, but there may even be more of the sex symbol… reading. What Was In Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Library?

Marilyn monroe diary fragments