James L. Weil (1929-2006)

The American poet and publisher James L. Weil died July 7. Born in New York in 1929, he studied at the University of Chicago and Oxford before becoming a businessman, retiring as senior vice-president of the Dialight Corporation in 1968. Weil lived in New Rochelle, New York, where he founded the Elizabeth Press, one of the most important publishers of American poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. His authors included William Bronk, John Taggart, and Theodore Enslin, among many others. In later years, he published exquisitely designed chapbooks of works by John Keats. Weil was much respected among his peers as an accomplished poet. Among his better known works is “A Coney Island Life”: