Elizabeth Pollet

Elizabeth Pollet attended Black Mountain College from 1938 to 1939. She was one of a number of students who were attracted to the college by Louis Adamic’s article in Harper’s. Both her father Joseph Pollet and her stepfather Ralph Scarlett were artists.

She took art with Albers although she did not care for his method of teaching. She also took writing with John Rice and took part in plays. Although she liked Black Mountain, she wanted to study at a university with a more intellectual structure. After a year she left to attend the University of Chicago.

Her early novel A Family Romance (1950) was successful. She was a poet, a translator and an editor. A brief early marriage ended in divorce as did her second marriage to Delmore Schwartz, a brilliant but disturbed poet and short story writer, whose use of alcohol and drugs resulted in his death in 1966. She edited his writings as Portrait of Delmore, Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz 1939-1959 (1986).

She was a longtime companion of Robert Sunley, a Black Mountain College student.

Biography written by Mary Emma Harris for the Black Mountain College Project.