Excerpts: from the Unpublished Files of Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

In late summer of 2006, in anticipation of a retrospective of his work at the Morgan Library in New York, Muriel Oxenberg Murphy prepared for publication a short collection of her writings on the artist Saul Steinberg. The project was modest, some fifteen or twenty pages recalling, in particular, her dear friend's "verbal wit." But the search through her files for written memories of Saul turned up a wealth of compelling material of all types-memoirs, short stories, journal entries and correspondence-stretching across some forty years. Thus what began as a handful of anecdotes and witticisms concerning a single friendship grew into a fragmented yet detailed portrait of an exceptional life, presented here as a collection of excerpts from Muriel's many, many files.