Posted in Houghton Library on Sep 29th, 2010 Comments Off on John Updike’s library cataloged and available for use
The book portion of the John Updike Archive is now cataloged and available for research use. The 1,635 volumes establish Updike as his own greatest collector. For example, the collection includes roughly ninety editions and printings of Rabbit, Run, including those in translation. Many of these volumes bear Updike’s annotations, which not only correct typographical […]
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Posted in Uncategorized on May 4th, 2010 5 Comments »
On June 24, 1910, Thomas Stearns Eliot graduated from Harvard College in an all-white, all-male class one-tenth today’s size. A new small exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the graduation of Harvard’s most famous poet, and includes Eliot’s transcript, a copy of the letter placing him on academic probation his freshman year, his student paper […]
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Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 17th, 2009 1 Comment »
Modern Books & Manuscripts has recently acquired a collection of works by Egyptian-French poet Edmond Jabès (1912-1991). Born to a Jewish family of Italian nationality in Cairo, Jabès published his first book of poetry, Illusions Sentimentales, at the age of eighteen. During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Jabès published books of poetry along with poems […]
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Posted in Houghton Library on Sep 22nd, 2009 Comments Off on Ezra Pound reading Galdós
We’ve just received a new addition to our collection of association copies, an 1897 edition of Benito Pérez Galdós’s realist novel, Doña Perfecta, owned and annotated by American intellectual Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Pound probably acquired the work in 1905, and annotated the text with numerous notes and translations. In a letter written to Iris Barry, […]
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Posted in Houghton Library on Aug 5th, 2009 Comments Off on What should we tell our children about Vietnam?: The Bill McCloud Collection
In 1987, Oklahoma junior high school teacher and Vietnam veteran Bill McCloud wanted to begin teaching his students about the Vietnam War. After conducting a survey to determine what Oklahoma students already knew about the war (and finding that they knew very little, and that little was taught), McCloud began writing letters to a number […]
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Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 11th, 2009 4 Comments »
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), novelist, literary theorist, philosopher, and journalist – though a reclusive figure in the literary world – had a profound impact on twentieth-century thinkers such as George Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. A recent acquisition by the Library, a joint purchase by Modern Books and […]
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Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2009 2 Comments »
German-born Winfried Georg Sebald (1944-2001) is widely known in the German-speaking world for his visionary novels, collections of poetry, and astute literary criticism. 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 […]
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Posted in Houghton Library on Nov 21st, 2008 3 Comments »
By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing. We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected […]
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