Every month in every year is Black History Month at the Beinecke Library, with resources available online, in the reading room, in the classrooms, and through...
McKay left a longer, 172-page draft in possession of his only child, who eventually donated it to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The shorter one wound up at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The two have now been reconciled for the first time to yield the book as published. Romance in Marseille, in other words, was never actually a lost or forgotten novel; it was just peculiarly hard to track down.
More may be coming. Cloutier stumbled on the forgotten manuscript of “Amiable With Big Teeth” while studying at Columbia in 2009. The two manuscripts of “Romance in Marseille,” held by Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale’s Beinecke Library — the Penguin Classics edition is based on the later Schomburg manuscript — have long been known to scholars, but copyright conflicts and a lack of market interest prevented the book’s publication. As archival research accelerates and 1920s-era writing is freed from copyright restrictions — this year, works from 1924 came into the public domain — it’s likely that more rediscovered works are on the way. Cloutier recently worked with the Beinecke to locate an uncataloged collection of manuscripts by Petry.
In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Salovey and Professor Feimster discuss the “long” civil rights movement, the contributions of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and how Yale students are using the university’s archival and museum collections in their classes.
King and the African American Freedom Movement
Jan. 20, noon-4 p.m.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St.
Highlights from the Beinecke Library’s collections related to King and to the African American freedom movement will be on public view in the courtyard-level reading room.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , from January 1776, and The American Crisis, from December 1776, are among seasonal selections on view in a temporary exhibit at...
Robert Reid-Pharr ’94 Ph.D., Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, meditated...
Robert Reid-Pharr ’89 M.A., ’91 M.A./M.Phil., ’94 Ph.D. discovered writer James Baldwin long before he set foot on Yale’s campus. “I read ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ as a 14-year-old,” Reid-Pharr says. “It was the first literature that spoke to me as a black person in a conservative, black, religious family.”