Posted in American literature, Poetry on Jun 13th, 2008 No Comments »
This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s […]
Posted in Russian language and literature, American literature on Jun 13th, 2008 No Comments »
This first edition of Mary Custis Vezey’s first collection of poems contains work in Russian and English, as well as translations of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilev into English and of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and George Santayana into Russian.
Bilingual poet Mary Custis Vezey (sometimes spelled Mariia Vizi, 1904-1994) was born in New […]
Posted in Manuscripts, American literature, Poetry on May 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most textually interesting in her corpus. She revised it over a period of nearly twenty years, and five versions survive: four in autograph, and one transcript of a lost autograph original. That “lost” original has now been recovered, […]
Posted in Harvard alumni, American literature on May 2nd, 2008 No Comments »
We recently acquired a comprehensive collection of material by and relating to American novelist and almost-Harvard-graduate James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978). The collection includes a selection of Cozzens’s correspondence, manuscript drafts, photographs, and diaries, including the diary he kept while a Harvard student, and while he was working on his first novel, Confusion. With this […]
Posted in Harvard alumni, Manuscripts, American literature on Apr 24th, 2008 No Comments »
Norman Mailer (1923-2007; Harvard class of 1943) leapt onto the literary stage in 1948 with the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, a partly autobiographical work based on his experiences during World War II. While he entered Harvard intending to major in engineering, he soon turned whole-heartedly to literature, joining […]
Posted in Manuscripts, American literature on Mar 25th, 2008 No Comments »
In 1950, in Key West, playwright Tennessee Williams finished a second draft of “The Rose Tattoo,” a play he had begun the year before in Rome. Williams called this draft the “kitchen sink” draft, reasoning that “I have thrown into it every dramatic element I could think of. Perhaps all of them will […]