Portrait of Time

Portrait of Time: Sea Drift is a previously unpublished autobiographical novel by well-known American poet Elizabeth Bartlett (1911–1994). The book is a recreation through Elizabeth Bartlett’s remarkable memory of her childhood in the New York City of the second decade of the 1900s.

The chief interest of the work lies in the insight it offers into the character and childhood of Elizabeth Bartlett as a poet, in its richly detailed descriptions of her experiences as a child, and in its descriptions from a perceptive and sensitive young person’s point of view of tenement life in the New York City of more than a century ago.

The book spans the time when Bartlett’s earliest memories were formed until approximately the age of 12. Portrait of Time is innovative in its style, recreating her early life with the vibrancy of remembered experience.

Portrait of Time: Sea Drift will be of interest to readers, lovers and students of Elizabeth Bartlett’s poetry, and to scholars, historians, and literary critics wishing to know more of her life and thought, and of a child’s experience growing up in New York City during the early 20th century.

This publication of Portrait of Time is a facsimile edition of the rare original manuscript with the author’s corrections and annotations, believed to be the only copy of the book in existence. It includes a Foreword by psychologist-philosopher Steven James Bartlett, Elizabeth Bartlett’s son and literary executor, who produced this digital edition.