An Interview with Patricia C. Willis

Patricia Willis (b. 1938) served as the first curator of the Marianne Moore archive at the Rosenbach Library from 1975 to 1987, and then as the Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library from 1987 to 2008. In addition to her monumental work as editor of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Elisabeth Sifton Books, Viking Penguin, 1986) and curator of the traveling exhibition, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse (Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1987), Willis has published crucial essays on Moore’s “An Octopus” and “Marriage.” In this interview with Karin Roffman, Willis discusses her life and work as a Marianne Moore scholar and curator, her immersion in the Moore archives at the Rosenbach in the years before the papers were cataloged, and the ways that she has sustained and deepened her thinking about this iconic modernist for sixty years.