Letters from Fairfield Porter and others to Carl Morse

Carl Morse was a gay American writer with an affection for the British. Morse grew up in Maine, attended Yale University, and spent two years in France on a Fulbright scholarship, where he came in contact with many British writers.

During the 1980s and 90s, he exercised an important influence on a generation of British gay and lesbian writers and performing artists through his inclusion in anthologies printed by Gay Men's Press, the Oscars Press and Gay Sweatshop; performances of his work at the Oval House Theatre in London; and his co-editing of Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988). A selection of his work in Three New York Poets (1987) introduced his poetry to a British audience. Morse lived for many years in Chelsea, New York with his partner, Fred Trump. He died in 2008 at the age of 73.

Morse had a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter (1907-1975). Porter was a painter and critic from Southampton, N.Y., who established his reputation as a painter and as a writer in the 1950s. Porter was well-known in the New York art world, and enjoyed an elder status among a circle of younger artists and their many poet friends, now known as the New York School. Porter died in 1975 at age 68.