Career
A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill"s play, "The Bait." They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Athens, and Key West. "lieutenant was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew," wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).
Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities.
Many critics consider David Jackson to be a kind of co-writer, certainly the catalyst if not the medium, for much of James Merrill"s most significant poetic output. The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980) were all written with Jackson"s assistance.
Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page apocalyptic poem published in its entirety in 1982.