Marguerite Yourcenar collection

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) was the author of historical novels, essays, poetry, and short stories, and a translator of works into her native French. Working principally in French, her most famous works are Mémoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian), published in 1951, and L'Oeuvre au Noir (The Abyss), published in 1968.

Madame Yourcenar was born Marguerite de Crayencour in Belgium, and came to the United States in 1937 in pursuit of her friendship with the American academic Grace Frick, who became her lifelong companion and translator. She returned to this country at the outbreak of the Second World War and became a naturalized citizen in 1947. She taught briefly at Sarah Lawrence College (1942) and lectured at other colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe, but chose to live and write at Northeast Harbor, Maine. Her long and distinguished career as a writer led to memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in the Acadêmie de Belgique, and, the first woman so elected, in the Acadêmie Française. She received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Bowdoin in 1968.