“Many scholars would argue that John Updike is one of, if not the, novelist of the late 20^th century,” Morris said. “No one can really write about the American novel without taking Updike into consideration.”

Although portions of the Archive were given to the library during Updike’s lifetime, and have been available for research at Houghton since 1970, they represented only a small fraction of the full collection. For decades, Updike had been depositing his papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, research files, and even golf score cards, in the library, but the material was available only with the author’s permission, and was not integrated with the material the library owned.

Cataloging the newly acquired material so it can be used by scholars is now one of the library’s “highest priorities,” since the Archive will not be available for research until that process is completed, Morris said. However, scholars will still be able to access materials given to the library by Updike before 1970, including early short story manuscripts written for the New Yorker; Telephone Poles, Updike’s early poetry collection; and nearly complete documentation on the creation of the novel that brought him his first taste of fame, Rabbit, Run (1960).

When the cataloging of the Archive is completed, the Updike Archive will offer students and scholars unparalleled insight into the working life of the man hailed as America’s last true man of letters.

Read the full press release here.

Above:  Updike at home.  Image  © Martha Updike, John Updike Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Right: Modern Books and Manuscripts student assistant Taylor Ferracane (left) and Assistant Curator Heather Cole unpack boxes of books from Updike’s collection.

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.

In 1861, President Lincoln  signed a bill making the United States Sanitary Commission into a government agency. Organized by thousands of women volunteers across the country, the commission succeeded in raising almost twenty five million dollars  during the course of the Civil War, and worked to cut the disease rate of the Union Army in half.*

In early 1864, the USSC held a “Sanitary Fair” in Brooklyn and Long Island to raise money for their efforts. The group published a daily newspaper titled The Drum Beat from 22 February to 5 March, with an extra issue on 11 March 1864.  The paper was professionally edited, illustrated, and printed, included work by leading writers and artists, and sold nearly 6000 copies per day at the fair and by subscription.  While an interesting example of a Civil War publication in its own right, the newspaper holds special significance for our collection at Houghton.

In the March 2, 1864 issue, an unsigned poem titled “Flowers” (”Flowers – Well – if anybody”) appeared.  A poem titled “Sunset” (”Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple”)  was published March 5, and “October” (”These are the days when the birds come back”) appeared March 11.  It was not until 1984 that scholar Karen Dandurand** attributed these poems to Emily Dickinson.  The Drum Beat was edited by the Reverent Richard Salter Storrs, Jr.,  a graduate of Amherst College and acquaintance of Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson.  Dandurand believes that Dickinson voluntarily contributed these poems to the war effort, perhaps through her brother, perhaps on her own.  (Prior to this discovery, scholars believed Dickinson felt ambivalent towards the Civil War, and gave up seeking publication of her work following numerous rejections.)

*See http://www.forttejon.org/ussc/ussc.html for more information on the USSC.

** See Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 56.1 (March 1984), p. 17.

US 6090.33 F*.  From the bequest of Evert Jansen Wendell, 1918.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

Image, above, John Updike as a Harvard senior, 1954   Image, below, Updike (left) with his staff at the Harvard Lampoon, 1954.    Both images © Harvard Yearbook Publications. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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.

We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” based on the 2007 exhibition curated by Christoph Irmscher.

This exhibition seeks to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had. By foregrounding the “private” Longfellow (the drawings made by and for his children, his journals, and letters written by and to him) alongside the international, multilingual and widely-traveled Longfellow, the exhibition demonstrates how Longfellow re-invented poetry as a public forum for everyone’s private feelings and how he consistently challenged the nationalistic distinction between what is typically and purely “American” and all that is not.

More information on the original exhibition, along with a slideshow of images, may be found here.

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 typescript:

One of the scarcest known Kerouac items, this is copy 17 of 100 printed, and is signed by Kerouac at the bottom. The block print was designed by Nicole Hollander.

The Lowell-Adams House Printers, a group of Harvard College students in the mid-1960s, printed poems by many writers, including Noel Coward, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike. A finding aid of their records, held at Houghton, may be viewed here.

*2007-822. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Bilingual poet Mary Custis Vezey (sometimes spelled Mariia Vizi, 1904-1994) was born in New York to a Russian mother and American father. Vezey grew up in St. Petersburg and Harbin, where Vezey’s father published an English-Russian newspaper. As an adult, Vezey lived in Shanghai, and eventually settled in San Francisco in 1973. Vezey published three books of poetry and left many unpublished works following her death at age 90.

Although Vezey has been called (by Olga Bakich, who edited Vezey’s collected works) “the most skilled poet in the group [of women writers in the Russian literary community in Harbin] in terms of her mastery of poetic form,” she still remains relatively unknown.

Vezey presented this copy of her poems to fellow Russian-American writer Margaret Zarudny Freema.

Pictured below is the book’s simple checkered-cloth cover, along with a translation into Russian of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “I Shall Go Back”:

Pictured below are two of Vezey’s own poems, one in Russian, and one in English.

*2007-819. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

This new four-page manuscript, most likely written ca. 1873, was probably sent to her friend and future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose wife, Mary Thacher Higginson, transcribed it (the transcription is now at the Boston Public Library in the Higginson Papers). Ralph Franklin believed that the original had been sent to Higginson along with a note and three other poems (see Fr 796); but the new autograph is on different paper (watermarked “A. Pirie and Sons 1871″) than the three still in the Higginson Papers (BPL MS Am 1093 (48), (40), and (50)). Higginson also refers to this poem in a letter to his co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd (1891 May 13); this, in combination with the transcript, makes it seem probable that the present manuscript was at one time in his possession.

But how did it leave his possession? The details of the manuscript’s provenance are not yet fully established, but it seems likely that Higginson gave it to Gretchen Osgood (Mrs. Fiske) Warren (1868-1961), whom he would have known through the Museum of Fine Arts. The present manuscript, reputedly from Mrs. Fiske Warren’s estate, appeared for sale at Skinner’s in Boston on 10 November 2001.

Houghton Library holds a variant of this poem, sent by Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan (Houghton MS Am 1118.3 (356)), which begins “The Wind begun to knead the Grass.” Now possible to view the two side by side, the manuscripts bring home to students and experienced textual scholars alike the physicality of Dickinson’s continual reworking of her poems, and her distribution of them to her friends.

The poem was written on one piece of paper folded in half. The first image below shows pages 4 and 1, and the second image shows pages 2 and 3. (Click on the images twice to see more detail.)

This version of the poem reads:

The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low –
He flung a Menace at the Earth –
A Menace at the Sky –

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad –
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -

The Wagons quickened on the streets -
The Thunder hurried slow –
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak -
And then a livid Claw –

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests –
The Cattle fled to Barns –
There came one drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands

That held the Dams – had parted hold
The Waters Wrecked the Sky -
But overlooked My Father’s House –
Just quartering a Tree –

*2007M-74. © The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Purchased with the Dickinson Collection Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Cozzens, who attended Harvard from 1922-1924, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Guard of Honor, inspired by his experiences during World War II. Cozzens wrote thirteen additional novels and numerous short stories.

The collection includes numerous editions of all of Cozzens’s works, including Guard of Honor and By Love Possessed. Pictured below are four different editions of Guard of Honor. Starting in the upper right corner, and going clockwise, these include: the 1998 Modern Library edition; an advance copy of the 1948 first American edition; a 1952 Permabooks paperback (priced at 35 cents!); and the 1949 first British edition of the novel. (Click on the image twice to enlarge it.)

Cozzens Papers, *2007M-69. Individual books will be in HOLLIS shortly. Purchased with funds from the Amy Lowell Trust. Image may not be reproduced without permission.

Two recent acquisitions give Mailer a continuing presence at Harvard, and testify to his concern with literary technique, and his efforts to continually improve his own writing and that of others: the papers of Richard G. Hannum, and those of Carole Mallory.

Richard Hannum collaborated with Mailer on the 1986 off-Broadway play Strawhead, about Marilyn Monroe, based on Mailer’s Of Women and Their Elegance (1980). Mailer had had a huge success with his 1973 biography of Monroe, Marilyn: A Novel Biography, in which he stated that she was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Hannum’s papers include his correspondence with Mailer, and drafts and final script for Strawhead. Pictured below is a page from Hannum and Mailer’s script for Strawhead, with Mailer’s handwritten notes (click on the image to enlarge it):

(Image © Richard G. Hannum and The Norman Mailer Estate.)

Carole Mallory began her career as a model, then turned actress, playing a Stepford wife along with Paula Prentiss, Katherine Ross, and Tina Louise in 1975. She met Norman Mailer in 1982, and he helped her to begin a career as a writer and journalist. She published a novel, Flash (1987) described by Gloria Steinem as “fast, smart, irresistible to read.” Her interviews—of Gore Vidal and Mailer; Mikhail Baryshnikov; and Warren Beatty, among others, appeared in Esquire, Elle, G.Q., Cosmopolitan, and others. The collection consists primarily of material relating to Norman Mailer, including correspondence, Mallory’s unpublished novel, heavily edited by Mailer, along with his edits to her interviews of him; transcripts and printed interviews of other notables; publishing contracts; and printed material. Pictured below is a page from an interview of Mailer conducted by Mallory in mid-1980s, with Mailer’s handwritten corrections (click to enlarge):

Both collections add to the wealth of material available for research and teaching about the writer’s craft: how writers develop their style and substance, often, as in these cases, through layers of revision. Mailer, in particular, thought of his writing as “a job. . .you have to work at it every day” and both of these collections testify that it was a job he took seriously, as evidenced in this selection, also from the Carole Mallory papers:

*b 2007M-59 and *2007M-63. © Carole Mallory, Richard Hannum, and the Norman Mailer Estate. Images may not be reproduced or quoted from without permission.

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 work. Perhaps none of them will work. Probably a few of them will work.”

A few of Williams’ annotations in pencil can be seen on this draft:

Williams showed this draft to director Elia Kazan, who felt it still needed work. Williams went through several more drafts before the play opened on Broadway on February 3, 1951. The play subsequently won Williams a Tony award for Best Play in 1951.

Williams stated in his note to the draft that he wanted “the male part to be offered to Marlon Brando.” Eli Wallach was cast instead, opposite Maureen Stapleton, who both went on to win Tony awards for their performances in the play.

MS Am 2660. Purchased with the Douglass Roby Fund for the Harvard College Library and with funds from the Amy Lowell Trust. Images may not be reproduced without permission.