News

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

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.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge wins Yale’s 2021 Bollingen Prize for Poetry
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,...
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.
Langston Hughes’ Homemade Christmas Cards From 1950 (Open Culture)
December 25, 2020
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale’s Treasure Chest (La Gazette Drouot)
December 22, 2020
Christmas card that shocked with boozy image in 1843 goes on sale (New York Daily News)
December 4, 2020
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.
Oxford student makes rare discovery (Emory University)
November 24, 2020
Oxford pre-med undergraduate finds unpublished manuscript by poet and physician William Carlos Williams
Reaching for Joy: Poet Toi Derricotte discusses isolation, community, and taking risks (Chapter 16)
November 16, 2020
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.
Words for the Nation: A Playlist of Readings from the Collections
November 2, 2020

Expecting to be waiting in line any time soon? Stressed and looking for prompts from the past for reflection in the present about paths for the future? For...
Reënacting the Trial of a Black Woman Convicted of Voter Fraud (The New Yorker)
November 2, 2020
“Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason,” a show about a woman accused of voter fraud, echoes Langston Hughes’s “The Ballot and Me.”
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.
'Lost' letters reveal JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson's mutual affection (The Guardian)
October 25, 2020
Dr Michael Shaw, a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Stirling, came across the letters while researching a box of correspondence at Beinecke Library in Yale University. The letters had been acquired by the collector Edwin J.Beinecke in the 1950s and were catalogued and listed in the library archive.
Claude McKay in Our Time: A Conversation with Gary Holcomb and William J. Maxwell on “Romance in Marseille” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
October 23, 2020
GEH: I didn’t discover the originally archived text. The shorter version has been available in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since the 1940s. Sometime along the way, the longer, probably later version appeared in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collection when his daughter, Hope Virtue McKay, contributed it, we think.
Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English, edited by Ann Kjelberg (The Irish Times)
October 17, 2020
Brodsky is one of few writers, like Larkin and MacNeice, who first allowed me to entertain the inconceivable notion that I too could actually enjoy poetry, rather than simply memorise it to answer Leaving Cert questions or quote from it so as to make other people feel inadequate (my understanding of poetry readers hitherto).
Art & Protest: A Conversation
October 14, 2020

See, download, and share poster From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street , Bolotnaya Square to Nuit debout , the Arab Spring , the Movement of the...
Beinecke director announces retirement after 30 years of library service (Yale Daily News)
October 13, 2020
After working within the Yale University Library system for more than 30 years and serving as the director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for 10 of those years, Edwin Schroeder, who goes by E.C., will retire Aug. 31, 2021.