Yale Collection of American Literature

An example of the Collection’s great strength in printed, manuscript, and visual materials documenting American Poetry is its outstanding holdings of materials relating to the life and writing of Walt Whitman.

Collection highlights exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911 – 2011.

The bestselling book of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) provides an example of the rapidly changing print culture of the period. The Collection contains an expansive range of books, pamphlets, broadsides, sheet music, cards, memorabilia, and other materials documenting more than 150 years of this still-significant novel’s publication history, readership, and cultural evolution.

The lives and work of important American artists and arts communities are well documented in the Collection, especially at pointsof intersection between twentieth-century literature and the visual arts.

Resources for research about photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

American books uniting art and text, including fine press editions and handmade works, traditional codex formats and imaginative alternative bindings.

Materials featured on the Yale Collection of American Literature Blog may be protected by copyright restrictions; permission to publish should be sought from the owners of the rights, typically the creator or the heirs to his or her estate.