News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Meet the Winners of the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize (Book Riot)

    February 4, 2021

    The winners of the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prizes were announced last week to much excitement and acclaim. Recognizing exceptional literary achievement, the prize is awarded annually to eight authors writing in English anywhere in the world in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. It is among the world’s most generous literary prizes — administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library — with recipients receiving $165,000 to support their work.

  • The 50 Best Libraries in the United States (Town & Country)

    February 4, 2021

    What's as awe-inducing as the number of rare books Yale University's Beinecke Library holds (about 1 million, for the record)? To be frank, what holds them: A large glass tower that stands tall at the center of this marble, granite and bronze structure.

  • Biography Symposium 2021

    February 1, 2021

    REGISTER Wednesday February 24th, 12-1pm Langdon Hammer & Terrance Hayes Zoom Webinar Registration Information: https://bit.ly/38V8xz1 Thursday February...

  • Yale honors MLK throughout January (Yale Daily News)

    January 20, 2021

    he Beinecke library also celebrated MLK Day via Zoom by hosting a virtual talk on Monday with North Carolina State University professor Jason Miller on the intersections between Dr. King’s rhetoric and the writing of prominent African American poet Langston Hughes. “To be clear, Langston Hughes’ poetry hovers behind Dr. King’s metaphors like a watermark on bonded paper,” Miller told listeners during the event. “The poet that he [King] seemed drawn to most personally — that is, poems in which he personally sought out, rather than simply writing down when others spoke — includes the poetry of Langston Hughes, his wife Coretta’s favorite poet.” At the event, Miller presented several images from the Beinecke’s collection to more than 300 live participants at the webinar.

  • How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today? (New York Times)

    January 20, 2021

    “The Custom of the Country” (1913), like much that Edith Wharton wrote, can be described as a novel of manners. That’s to say, a social fiction in which the carefully observed customs of a particular society shape the characters’ actions and the plot. The designation somehow implies frivolity, or at least, traditionally, the feminine or domestic sphere (Jane Austen could be considered the first author of such works); and in this period of profound crisis in American society, it might seem easy to dismiss the relevance of such diverting works.

  • Merrill House writer Nicholas Boggs discusses his work on James Baldwin (The Day of New London)

    January 15, 2021

    Q. When you were searching for a thesis topic at Yale, were you aware of "Little Man, Little Man," and how did you learn more about it? A. I was taking a class on Baldwin, and the professor mentioned there was an out-of-print children's book by Baldwin housed at (Yale's) Beinecke (Rare Books & Manuscripts Library), so I went to check it out. I was fascinated by the backstory and its status as a literary work. Baldwin actually called it a "child's story for adults," and it was written entirely in what he called and celebrated as "Black English," a rarity for children's literature.

  • Berssenbrugge Wins 2021 Bollingen Prize (Publishers Weekly)

    January 12, 2021

    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge has been named the winner of Yale’s 2021 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The Bollingen Prize, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library through the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The prize includes a cash award of $165,000.

  • Visual Resources of the Middle East

    December 2, 2020

    Yale University holds a wide array of images from the Middle East across its encyclopedic collections. The goal of the Visual Resources of the Middle East (VRME) project is to house highlights from different collections onto one platform. These highlights are an introduction into the vast holdings at Yale, with the aim of opening the holdings to a diverse audience at and beyond Yale.

  • A Granted Prayer: An unpublished story by Edith Wharton (The Atlantic)

    November 9, 2020

    While doing postdoctoral research for a project on Edith Wharton’s short fiction, Sarah Whitehead, an independent scholar in London, came across the typescript of an unpublished story, titled “A Granted Prayer,” in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.

  • Rituals of Housekeeping, Memories of Home: On Marilynne Robinson’s First Novel (LitHub)

    October 29, 2020

    Robinson began working on the novel in the mid to late 1970s when she was establishing housekeeping herself, presumably in Seattle, Washington, where she was a student in the English PhD program. She also had two young sons and worked on the book at night, writing by hand while they were sleeping. Her notebooks from this period, housed in the archives of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, offer a sense of her life at the time.