for one of her early works, Newton Demands the Muse. In 1940, she became the first woman president of Phi Beta Kappa; in 1943 she took over for a year as the interim editor of that organization's literary journal, The American Scholar, after its first editor, William Allison Shimer, resigned. She was also president of the Modern Language Association in 1963. An authority on 17th-century literature and thought, she was the author of numerous books. She was awarded the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1971 for her pioneering work in the relationship between science and literature. Nicolson was awarded honorary degrees from over 17 colleges. She was the first woman to receive the Wilbur Cross Medal, an award for distinguished alumni of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Death She died on March 9, 1981, in White Plains, NY. Books The Art of Description, F.S. Crofts & Co. (1937) Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets, Princeton University Press (1946) (1966) Voyages to the Moon, Macmillan Co. (1948) The Breaking of the Circle (1950) Science and Imagination (1956); Archon Books (1976) Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959); University of Washington Press (1997) A Reader's Guide to John Milton, (1963); Syracuse University Press (1998) Pepys' Diary and the New Science (1965) Books are Not Dead Things, College of William and Mary (1966) (co-authored with G. S. Rousseau/George Rousseau) "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences, Princeton University Press (1968) John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His Poetry, Octagon Books (1971) The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and Their Friends, 1642-1684, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Oxford University Press (1992) The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson & David Stuart Rodes, University of Nebraska Press (1992) Zephyr and Boreas: Winds of Change in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin: A Festschrift in Memory of Pilgrim Award Winner, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, ed. George Edgar Slusser & Robert Reginald. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press (1997) "Two Voices: Science and Literature", Rockefeller Institute Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June 1963):1–11. References External links Marjorie Hope Nicolson papers at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections 1894 births 1981 deaths People from Yonkers, New York University of Michigan alumni Yale University alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni Fellows