Long Fiction:
Rochelle: Or, Virtue Rewarded, 1966
The Exhibitionist, 1967 (as Henry Sutton)
Feel Free, 1968
The Voyeur, 1969 (as Sutton)
Anagrams, 1970
Vector, 1971 (as Sutton)
A B C D, 1972
The Liberated, 1973 (as Sutton)
The Outer Mongolian, 1973
The Killing of the King, 1974
King of Hearts, 1976
That Golden Woman, 1976 (as Henry Lazarus)
Jo Stern, 1978
The Sacrifice, 1978 (as Sutton)
The Idol, 1979 (as David Benjamin)
The Proposal, 1980 (as Sutton)
Cold Comfort, 1980
Ringer, 1982
Alice at 80, 1984
The Agent, 1986 (with Bill Adler)
The Hussar, 1987
Salazar Blinks, 1988
Lives of the Saints, 1989
Turkish Delights, 1993
The Cliff, 1994, Bank Holiday Monday, 1996 (as Sutton)
Short Fiction:
Short Stories Are Not Real Life, 1991
Poetry:
Suits for the Dead, 1961
The Carnivore, 1965
Day Sailing, 1969
Child’s Play, 1972
Vital Signs: New and Selected Poems, 1975
Rounding the Horn, 1978
Dozens, 1981
Big Nose, 1983
The Walls of Thebes, 1986
Equinox, and Other Poems, 1989
Eight Longer Poems, 1990
Crossroads, 1994
A Gift: The Life of Da Ponte, a Poem, 1996
PS3569.L3: Poems, 1998
Falling from Silence, 2001
Nonfiction:
Understanding Social Life, 1976 (with Paul F. Secord and Carl W. Backman)
Physicians Observed, 1987
Virgil, 1991
Translations:
The Eclogues of Virgil, 1971
The Eclogues and the Georgics of Virgil, 1972
The Tristia of Ovid, 1986
Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, 1990
Five Plays of Seneca, 1991
The Metamorphoses of Ovid, 1994
Sixty-one Psalms of David, 1996
Hymns of Prudentius, 1996
Epic and Epigram: Two Elizabethan Entertainments, 1997 (of John Owen’s Epigrammata)
A Crown for the King, 1998 (of Ibn Gabirol)
The Oresteia, 1998 (of Aeschylus)
The Poem of Queen Esther, 1999 (of João Pinto Delgado)
The Voyage of the Argo: The Argonautica of Gaius Valerius Flaccus, 1999
The Book of the Twelve Prophets, 2000
The Latin Odes of Jean Dorat, 2000
Sonnets of Love and Death, 2001 (of Jean de Sponde)
Edited Texts:
Land of Superior Mirages: New and Selected Poems, 1986 (by Adrien Stoutenburg)
Aristophanes, 1998-1999 (with Palmer Bovie)
Euripides, 1998-1999 (with Bovie)
Menander, 1998 (with Bovie)
Sophocles, 1998-1999 (with Bovie)
Aeschylus, 1998-1999
Plautus: The Comedies, 1995 (with Bovie)
David Rytman Slavitt has had four writing careers: as a poet, as a translator of Latin poetry, as a respected (if not widely read) novelist, and (briefly and pseudonymously) as a best-selling pop trash writer in the 1960’s.
Slavitt was born in 1935, the son of attorney Samuel Saul Slavitt and the former Adele Beatrice Rytman. From childhood, David was told it was his duty to fulfill a failed dream of his father’s: Samuel Slavitt had been admitted to Yale University and spent two happy years there, then was forced to withdraw because his parents could no longer afford the tuition. Samuel persevered, attending New York University at night while working, and became a successful lawyer. He vowed, however, that his son would follow the path he had wanted: prep school at Phillips Andover, undergraduate study at Yale, followed by Harvard Law School.
David Slavitt followed orders, graduating from Andover in 1952 and proceeding to Yale, which he found, to his surprise, he actually enjoyed, despite the aspects of filial duty. He graduated magna cum laude in 1956 but refused to go on to law school and took a job in the personnel department at Reader’s Digest. He stayed there long enough to buy two ship tickets, then, on August 27, 1956, he married Lynn Nita Meyer, and they sailed on the Queen Elizabeth. The trip ended badly, however: After they had been on their honeymoon for only a week, they learned that Lynn’s mother had died, and they had to return home immediately.
Slavitt returned to school, gaining an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1956 for a dissertation on the poetry of Dudley Fitts. His son, Evan Meyer Slavitt, was born that year. (Slavitt and his wife later had two more children, Sarah Rebecca and Joshua Rytman.) Slavitt accepted a teaching job at Georgia Institute of Technology. He hated his year there, blaming the low level of educational development of his students and the lack of esteem for literary studies.
He returned to New York in 1958 and was hired by Newsweek, where he worked in various editorial capacities, including book and film reviewing, and was given the title of associate editor. His wife suffered a debilitating attack of mononucleosis, and he began staying at his parents’ house in his native city, White Plains, New York.
His first book of poetry, Suits for the Dead, was published in Scribner’s prestigious Poets of Today series in 1961. Series editor John Hall Wheelock praised him for his virtuosity, his mastery of a variety of forms, and his use of tone.
In 1965 Slavitt left Newsweek to become a full-time writer. Like Robert Graves, he set out to support the poetry that he loved to create by the writing of novels. In 1966 he published Rochelle: Or Virtue Rewarded, a serious novel. At this point Bernard Geis, notorious as the publisher of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) and other fiction for the mass market, suggested that Slavitt could make a lot of money writing that sort of book. Slavitt yielded, producing The Exhibitionist, a showbiz roman à clef he allowed Geis to publish under the pseudonym Henry Sutton. The book reached the best-seller lists, and the revelation that its actual author was a serious writer and poet probably supplied a frisson that helped its sales.
The second Sutton book, The Voyeur, whose protagonist resembled publisher Hugh Hefner, sold less well; perhaps readers were tiring of the joke. Vector represented an effort at socially conscious mass-market pop, warning of the dangers of biological warfare experiments. It made little splash, as did four succeeding Sutton novels and three other pseudonymous popular books.
Meanwhile, Sutton was writing under his own name, with poetry collections appearing from university presses every three years or so. As Slavitt, he wrote a wide variety of literary novels, including Anagrams, a university novel enriched by Joycean word play, and The Outer Mongolian, an imaginative tale in which a child with Down syndrome, his intellect briefly and freakishly enhanced to superhuman levels, plays havoc with the American politics of the 1960’s.
In 1971 he began yet another literary career, as a Latin translator, with his rendition of The Eclogues of Virgil. In 1975 his poetry received notice, with a major publisher, Doubleday, issuing Vital Signs.
On December 20, 1977, Slavitt divorced his first wife; the next year he married physician Janet Lee Abrahm. Also in 1978 he published Jo Stern, a surprisingly sympathetic fictionalized account of Jacqueline Susann’s courageous struggle with terminal cancer. Alice at 80 was a fictional treatment of the old age of the woman who, as a child, had inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The Agent, published as “Created by” book packager Bill Adler and written by Slavitt, returned to the territory of The Exhibitionist but with a new wit and irony. In the 1990’s, Slavitt continued to publish poetry and fiction, usually with university presses. He also worked more as a Latin translator, publishing more than a dozen translations and adaptations of poetry, plays, and fables.