Pound probably acquired the work in 1905, and annotated the text with numerous notes and translations.  In a letter written to Iris Barry, circa 1916, Pound wrote, “Spain has one good modern novelist, Galdós.”

*2009-181.  Purchased with the P.D. Howe fund.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Image may not be reproduced without permission.

Those who replied, sometimes at great length, included U.S. presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush; secretaries of defense and members of Congress;  high-ranking military officials; reporters; writers of fiction and non-fiction, including Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, and Ken Kesey; folk singers Pete Seeger and Country Joe McDonald; and many more, totalling over 100 respondents.

In 1989, McCloud published a book, titled What Should We Tell our Children About Vietnam?, which included some of the responses he had received.

McCloud’s archive has now come to Houghton, and includes the letters McCloud received, along with his teaching materials and student papers, and McCloud’s publications on these topics.

Pictured here is an image of McCloud’s initial survey of students’ knowledge:

McCloud’s “Essential topics for teaching a short unit on the Vietnam War”:

McCloud also spoke to elementary school students about the war.  His papers contain letters from a group of the children he visited:

b*2009M-2.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

In Blanchot’s criticism (writing, for example, about Beckett, Holderlin, Kafka, Mallarmé, Proust, Rilke, Sade), he asked the question: what is literature? In philosophical dialogue with Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, he analyzed ontological and ethical questions.  He developed a theory of writing and the book that moved away from metaphysical truth toward a sense of absence and an ethics of the Other (‘community’) that was irreducibly plural.

Having disengaged from his right-wing political nationalist writings during the 1930s, he re-engaged on the left in 1958 with the Algerian War and the events of May 1968 in France.  He is the author of Awaiting Oblivion, The Book to Come, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Space of Literature, The Step Not Beyond, Thomas the Obscure, The Unavowable Community, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation, among other works.

Houghton Library recently acquired page proofs of Blanchot’s 1969 major work, L’Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation).  Blanchot seemingly did not preserve the records of his literary work; these were (according to the dealer from whom they were purchased) salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper.  The proofs contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs (of which some are small slips taped over pages, and some are multiple pages in length).  Four pages are pictured below (click on each one to enlarge it).

An article providing an overview of the new material uncovered in the proofs, by Smith Professor of French Language and Literature Christie McDonald, along with a brief history of their journey to the Library by Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris, will appear in the the new online journal of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, The Romance Sphere.

MS Fr 497.  Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund 1928.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Sebald’s award-winning fiction includes the novels Schwindel, Gefühle (Vertigo)(1990), Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) (1992),  Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn) (1995), and Austerlitz (2001), among others, focus on themes of European history, the collective memory of the postwar generation, and the chaos of the modern world.  The novels are not entirely fiction, and have been described as part memoir, part travelogue.  Sebald’s work is frequently illustrated by uncaptioned photographs and other images throughout his text, often meant to evoke the indistinct nature of memory.

Houghton has recently acquired a collection of over thirty works by and about Sebald, a gift of Sebald bibliographer Roger Stoddard.  The materials from this accession have been cataloged separately, but may be viewed by searching Hollis.

Much of Sebald’s work has been translated into English by Michael Hulse.  For more Sebald at Houghton, see the Michael Hulse translations of W.G. Sebald papers, MS Eng 1632.

Image above is from the dust jacket of the 2001 Verlag edition of Austerlitz.

Poet, dramatist, Harvard graduate and Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) began to study Latin while a student at Smith Academy from 1898-1905, and continued to study languages, both modern and ancient, through college.  Eliot probably acquired J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature while studying at Harvard.  While he made few annotations to the text itself, Eliot also made extensive notes in pencil on several blank pages throughout the book.  Eliot’s bookplate is also pasted inside the front cover (Eliot’s bookplate includes his family’s motto Tace et fac, “be silent and act.”)  Examples of Eliot’s early handwriting are uncommon, and as Eliot made extensive use of his linguistic skills within his poetry, it is always interesting to catch a glimpse into his study of them. (Click on the images to magnify them.)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the most important figures in the Beat movement of the mid-twentieth century.  Two years after graduation from Columbia University, while working in New York as a market researcher, Ginsberg purchased this 1936 edition of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1935, which he signed “Allen Ginsberg / October 1950″ on the front free endpaper.  Ginsberg’s extensive annotations to The Waste Land document his efforts to work through the poem.

Mackail, Latin Literature. New York: Scribners, 1895.  *2008-1002.

Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1935. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [1936]  *AC95.G4351.Zz936e.

Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.