New from Beinecke Collections
Ida: A Novel
a new edition, edited by Logan Esdale; published by Yale University Press
Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book’s publication. Stein’s careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, PA, of German-Jewish immigrants. She moved to Paris in 1903 and lived in France for the rest of her life. She published Ida: A Novel in 1941, eight years after she became famous for her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Logan Esdale teaches at California State University, Long Beach.
Beinecke Collections: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 76); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Image Guide
Terry Tempest Williams Archive
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of American writer, poet, naturalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams.
The author of more than a dozen books including The Secret Language of Snow (1984), Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (1995), Leap (2000), and Finding Beauty in a Broken World (2008), Williams calls attention to the relationship between our natural environment and social justice. A fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience to protest nuclear testing in Nevada, and served on the boards of The Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy’s Utah Chapter, the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, and on the President’s Council for Sustainable Development. She has collaborated with artists and photographers such as Mary Franks, Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Meridel Rubenstein, and Debra Bloomfield. Her essays on ecological and social issues have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion, and The Progressive. In 2006, The Wilderness Society presented William’s with its Robert Marshall Award, the highest honor the society bestows.
Ms. Williams, whose ancestors were among the earliest Mormon pioneers to settle the valley of the Great Salt Lake, grew up in Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1978 with a degree in English and a minor in biology. She taught on the Navajo reservation at Montezuma Creek, a settlement of fewer than 500 in the southeast corner of Utah, and earned a master’s degree in Environmental Education in 1984. From 1986 through 1996 she worked as curator of education and naturalist in residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Ms. Williams, who was recently a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.
“For more than a quarter of a century,” observes George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, “Terry Tempest Williams has written lyrically about life and the landscape of her Utah home. She has joined with artists, writers, and scientists to increase our appreciation of the wonder and fragility of the world we inhabit and to make us more aware of how the damage we cause that world rebounds to harm us individually and to diminish our society. Her diaries, journals and drafts reveal the extraordinary originality of her creative process while her correspondence with colleagues from around the county illuminates the concerns and efforts of a generation of American environmental activists.”
Ms. Williams’ papers, which comprise 204 boxes, arrived in New Haven this summer. The library’s archivists are organizing the papers and preparing a guide to them, after which they will be opened for consultation.
Questions about the Williams’ papers may be directed to George Miles, Curator of Western Americana, at George.Miles@yale.edu or to Nancy Kuhl, Curator of American Literature for Poetry, at Nancy.Kuhl@yale.edu.
Photo: Terry Tempest Williams
New Exhibition
Exile as Destiny: Czeslaw Milosz and America
He had his home, posthumous, in the town of New Haven,
In a white building, behind walls
Of translucent marble like turtle shell
—Czesław Miłosz, from “Beinecke Library.” Provinces. New York: Ecco Press, 1991.
The life of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, novelist, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate, spanned a time of political upheavals and social turmoil. He lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, in the Paris of exiled literati, and in the United States, perched atop the Berkeley hills with a view of San Francisco Bay. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library celebrates the centennial of Czesław Miłosz, renowned author of Bells in Winter, Captive Mind and Native Realm, with an exhibition drawn from the library’s holdings. The manuscripts, documents, and photographs on display reveal lesser-known aspects of Miłosz’s multifaceted relationship with America, with his adopted home in California, with fellow émigré authors, and with the English language.
Related Conference: Milosz and America
Exorcism
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has acquired Eugene O’Neill’s “lost” one-act play, “Exorcism” (1919). The play, along with a facsimile of the typescript, will be published in a cloth edition by Yale University Press in February 2012, featuring an introduction by the noted American playwright Edward Albee. The New Yorker has acquired first serial rights and will publish the play in its entirety, with an introduction by theater critic John Lahr, in the magazine’s Fall Books issue, October 17, 2011 (on newsstands October 10). A short video of the actor Tommy Schrider reading from “Exorcism” will be featured on The New Yorker’s website and iPad application: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/eugene-oneill-exorcism-reading.html .
“Exorcism,” set in 1912, is based on O’Neill’s suicide attempt from an overdose of veronal in a squalid, Manhattan rooming house. The play premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City on March 26, 1920. Following a few performances, however, O’Neill chose, abruptly, to cancel the production and to retract and destroy all known copies of the script. O’Neill biographers have speculated that the play, produced as O’Neill’s father was dying, was perhaps too revealing of O’Neill’s own demons and potentially distressing for his parents.
Despite long-held presumptions that the play was irrevocably lost, O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton, apparently retained a copy of the play, which she gave as a Christmas gift to the writer Philip Yordan after her divorce from O’Neill. Yordan is perhaps best known for his O’Neill-inspired play, and later film, Anna Lucasta, starring an all-black cast. The typescript, with edits and emendations in O’Neill’s own hand, was discovered by a researcher working in Yordan’s papers, together with the original envelope; the label is inscribed, “Something you said you’d like to have / Agnes & Mac” (Morris “Mac” Kaufman was Boulton’s third husband).
O’Neill, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1936), returned to many of the issues that surface in “Exorcism” in his heavily autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night, published posthumously in 1956 and considered to be his masterpiece. The discovery of “Exorcism,” after ninety years, adds significantly to O’Neill’s biography, intimating the overwhelming role that suicide would take in his personal life along with the issue’s influence and impact on his work. The play also marks a pivotal moment in O’Neill’s prolific career, providing further insight into the later works for which he is now revered.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the principal repository for the Eugene O’Neill Papers. A detailed description of the papers is available online: Eugene O’Neill Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 123). Some materials from the collection can be viewed online: Eugene O’Neill Papers Image Guide. Related materials and collections may be located using the Beiencke Library’s various research tools: Guide to Research Tools.
For inquiries about the play, or the Eugene O’Neill Papers, please contact Louise Bernard (louise.bernard@yale.edu<mailto:louise.bernard@yale.edu>), Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature for Prose and Drama, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
For inquiries about the play’s publication in book form this February, please contact Brenda King (brenda.king@yale.edu<https://connect.yale.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=73c3409735984d659ba72031b6fc15e7&URL=mailto%3abrenda.king%40yale.edu>), Publicity Director, Yale University Press.
Image: Photograph of Eugene O’Neill, inscribed to his son [1927].
A Manifesto of Queer Modernism
A Manifesto of Queer Modernism
a lecture by Tirza T. Latimer, California College of the Arts
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
5:30pm
The Loria Center
190 York Street, Room 351
Queer friendship circles, like the ones that formed around Gertrude Stein in the early twentieth century, played a pivotal role in the incubation of modernism and its propagation on American terrain. Stein’s network consisted largely of art world figures who shared sexual as well as aesthetic affinities. They honed practices (such as portraiture) and initiated trends (such as neo-romanticism), that celebrated their sentimental and artistic connections. They exchanged all manner of tributes: photographs, paintings, collages, word portraits, and musical compositions. They produced collective works and undertook interdisciplinary efforts–neither typically referenced in histories of modernism. For instance, the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts–composed by Virgil Thomson to Stein’s libretto, choreographed by Frederick Ashton, and performed by a Harlem chorus resplendent in Florine Stettheimer’s costumes–has not been widely touted as an important modernist event. Yet, its makers meant, Tirza T. Latimer argues, to train a spotlight on alternate forms of modernist practice.
Image: Photograph of the stage set for Four Saints in Three Acts, from the Florine Stettheimer Papers
Introducing Aeon
Introducing AEON: The future is now!
Aeon is an online registration and requesting service designed specifically for special collections and research libraries.
Beginning on Monday, October 3, the Beinecke Library will discontinue use of all paper call slips in favor of Aeon online requesting. Yale faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID. Visiting researchers who have registered with us will be assigned a username and password at the desk.
We believe this new system will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service. However, as with any new technology, there may be some issues within the first few weeks that could lead to slight delays in your requests. Thank you for your patience.
For AEON info on the Beinecke home page: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brblvisi.html
For additional information on AEON: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/
For questions: Moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu
“This Is My Life”
“This Is My Life”: The Sonnet and the Emergence of Black Subjectivity
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Beinecke Library, Room 38
Part of a larger research project on the African American sonnet, this talk will explore the role of the sonnet form in the emergence of an individualized subjectivity in turn-of-the-century black writing. African American poetry in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly public. Where it did not take a stand in political debates, it at least presented the kind of exteriorized, carefully crafted persona deemed suitable in the struggle for cultural recognition. It was in the sonnet, that poets were first able to move beyond these constraints toward a fuller self-expression. Dunbar, Braithwaite, and a number of their contemporaries took advantage of the emotional depth associated with the sonnet form to articulate a literary subjectivity that was often partial and paradoxical but constituted an important step toward cultural and psychological emancipation.
Timo Müller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Augsburg, Germany, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2009. His main research areas are modernism, ecocriticism, and African American and Caribbean literature. He has published The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) as well as articles in journals including Anglia, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature. An article on James Weldon Johnson and the genteel tradition is forthcoming. His research at Beinecke is for his current book project, The African American Sonnet.
Image: Aaron Douglas illustration appearing in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, 1926.
Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O’Keeffe Letters Project
The Beiencke Library is pleased to announce the completion of several related projects designed to make the correspondence between photographer, gallerist, and arts advocate Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe more accessible to students, scholars, and general readers for research and reading.
The projects are rooted in the Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, one the Yale Collection of American Literature’s richest archival collections. This archive, a gift to Yale from Georgia O’Keeffe, supplemented by additional gifts from the Stieglitz family and other donors, has long supported important research not only into the lives and work of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, but also the work of many of their contemporaries, the development of modernist aesthetics, and many other subjects ranging from the history of photography to the culture and landscape of the American southwest.
The present projects open the Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers to scholars, students, and general readers in several new ways. The publication of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933, edited by Sarah Greenough, makes this compelling correspondence available outside the Beinecke Library reading room for the first time. (About: My Faraway One at Yale University Press).
Alongside the publication of My Faraway One, the Beinecke Library has completed digitization projects which make related Stieglitz and O’Keeffe archival materials available to scholars in the library and at a distance online. The projects include complete description and scanning of all the materials associated with the Stieglitz and O’Keeffe correspondence, and seamless online organization and access to both metadata and high resolution image files (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Image Guide ; Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Finding Aid with links to images of Stieglitz/O’Keeffe letters). These projects simultaneously preserve and protect the fragile archival documents and make them fully accessible in their entirety to scholars all over the world.
My Faraway One was published jointly by the Yale University Press and the Beinecke Library with the generous support of William Reese, Y’77.
Party!
Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911 – 2011
EXHIBITION CLOSING PARTY
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 5:00
More about Multitudes: http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2011/09/14/multitudes/
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University, 121 Wall Street, New Haven
Free and open to the public
Multitudes
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1855
Founded in 1911 when Yale College graduate Owen Franklin Aldis donated his distinguished library of first editions of American fiction, drama, and poetry to the Yale Library, the Collection of American Literature stands as one of the most important collections of its kind. In the century following Aldis’s gift, the Collection has continued to grow, building on core areas and expanding to include complementary materials, from individual manuscripts to expansive literary archives, from little magazines and lively ephemera to high-tech artists’ books. The highlights exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911–2011 reveal areas of bibliographic strength and new development while demonstrating the Collection’s extraordinary richness, eclecticism, and depth. From the colonial period to the present, the Collection celebrates American Literature as a living art form with a complex history. Its evolving and vibrant traditions are a subject worthy of both rigorous scholarly attention as well as leisurely pursuit for the general reader.
Image: Samuel Hollyer, lithograph from a daguerreotype of Walt Whitman by Gabriel Harrison, 1855. Title page, Leaves of Grass, first edition 1855. An example of the Yale Collection of American Literature’s great strength in printed, manuscript, and visual materials documenting American Poetry is its outstanding collection of materials relating to the life and writing of Walt Whitman. One of the most important works of American Literature, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the democratic spirit, the emotional and intellectual power of literature and art, and of the poet himself. In this work, Whitman introduced a new mode of writing and of expression. In the 150 years since it was first published, Leaves of Grass and its author have played a crucial role in shaping American literature and America’s literary imagination. The Beinecke’s Whitman holdings contain copies of all major editions of Leaves of Grass, including five copies of the extraordinarily rare first edition, published in 1855, and several copies of the 1856 second edition, featuring a quotation from a letter Whitman received from Ralph Waldo Emerson in response to the first edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career…” In addition to printed works, the Library’s Walt Whitman Collection contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, art, and other material dating from 1842-1949, and features the Whitmania of Yale benefactors Owen Aldis, Louis Mayer Rabinowitz, Adrian Van Sinderen and others. Outstanding manuscripts include Whitman’s early 1850s text “Pictures,” often called a prototype for poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass because its expansive energy predicts the experimental free verse that characterizes Whitman’s work. The Collection also includes numerous photographs of the poet. Whitman was quite conscious of his public persona and understood the powerful role that photography, still a new and developing technology, could play in helping him to reach his American audience. From the “rough” depicted in the portrait on the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, to the respectable bard appearing in the edition published five years later, to the “Good Gray Poet” that emerged in the 1860s, Whitman’s photographic image evolved over the course of his career as a writer and public figure. The Whitman Collection also includes artworks and objects such as bronze medallions and Whitman’s own eyeglasses.
For more information about the Yale Collection of American Literature, contact Louise Bernard, Curator of Prose and Drama (louise.bernard@yale.edu) or Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry (nancy.kuhl@yale.edu). Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection American Literature was organized with the assistance of Charlotte Parker, Y’2013.
leave a comment