RIAMCO

Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online

For Participating Institutions

Daisy Aldan papers (Ms.85.3)

Brown University Library

Box A
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: Manuscripts: 401-863-3723; University Archives: 401-863-2148
Email: Manuscripts: hay@brown.edu; University Archives: archives@brown.edu

Biographical note

Daisy Aldan (1923-2001) was born in New York City to Louis Aldan, a designer, and Esther Edelheit Aldan an actress. She received a B.A. degree from Hunter College in 1943, and an M.A. from Brooklyn College in 1948, and did further graduate study at New York University. Aldan was a poet, editor, and translator who read and lectured throughout the United States and Europe.

Aldan was part of the New York City poetry scene of the 1950s and 1960s. She created her own publishing company, Tiber Press (which later became Folder Editions), publishing her own work as well as that of struggling Beat Generation writers. Daisy Aldan's poetry was influenced by modern French poetry and metaphysics and she edited and published translations of works by Stephane Mallarmé, Anaïs Nin, Albert Steffen, and Rudolf Steiner. To supplement her income, Aldan taught English, creative writing, literature, speech, and film studies at the New York School of Art and Design before retiring in the 1970s to focus on her writing.

Her poetry books include The Destruction of Cathedrals and Other Poems (1963), The Masks Are Becoming Faces (1964), Breakthrough (1971), Love Poems of Daisy Aldan (1972), Between High Tides (1978), and In Passage (1987), the latter two of which won her Pulitzer Prize nominations. Other credits include The NEA Poetry Prize, the American Literary Translator's Award, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her novella, Day of the Wounded Eagle (1991). Daisy Aldan contributed to anthologies including Fifty-Three American Poets of Today (1973), Twentieth-Century American Women Poets (1974), and The Little Magazine in America Today (1978), as well as to magazines including Botteghe Oscure, Imago, Massachusetts Review, New York Times, Poet and Critic, and Poetry.

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