Yale Collection of American Literature

The Yale Collection of American Literature documents the creative lives, the artistic communities, and the literary achievements of American writers. The collectionis noted for its strength in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century poetry, fiction, and dramatic writings. The archives of writers of diverse backgrounds underscore the collection’s interest in the indigenous and immigrant cultures that shape American literature.

  • A COMPOSITIONAL COLLABORATION(?) BETWEEN MARGARET BONDS AND FLORENCE PRICE: “Sleep Song” (Medium)

    January 20, 2023

    And it’s how we know that Florence B. Price had a hand in producing the only surviving exemplar of Margaret Bonds’s earliest surviving choral work: the Sleep Song for women’s chorus and piano, recently published by Hildegard Publishing Company as part of their ongoing Margaret Bonds Signature Series. That undated manuscript is held among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 8, folder 41), as are the three autographs for the solo version of Sleep Song. The latter all identify Margaret Bonds as a member of ASCAP, which Bonds joined as a non-participating member in 1952, and of which she became a full member in 1955.

  • How Janet Malcolm Created Her Own Personal Archive (LitHub)

    January 18, 2023

    It’s hardly coincidental that Malcolm was organizing her own archive around the same time that she began to explore writing about her life. In 2013, she sent her first shipment—59 boxes of assorted detritus—up to New Haven, where they would live at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To say that Malcolm organized her papers would be a stretch. In some cases, she simply emptied the contents of her filing cabinets into cardboard boxes. But elsewhere, she annotated letters and folders, leaving easter eggs and reminders for any future researcher that she was thinking carefully about what to include in her archive and, more importantly, what to leave out.

  • Campus events honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 10, 2023

    The Yale and New Haven communities will commemorate the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during a series of campus events, including a keynote address by his eldest son, Martin Luther King III. The campus celebrations, which also will include library exhibits highlighting King’s contributions, a poetry slam, an exploration of King’s influence on environmental justice, and a love march, are part of the university’s annual campus commemoration of the famed civil rights activist and preacher.

  • Zelda Fitzgerald's Wish to Publish Paper Dolls Book Fulfilled Decades Later (Newsweek)

    November 18, 2022

    Zelda Fitzgerald once gauged a publisher's interest in creating a collection filled with the striking paper dolls she made for her daughter, but the book she imagined never materialized. More than 70 years after Zelda's death, that imagining has now come to life in The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald, a collection pulled together by Zelda's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan. Scribner is publishing the book on November 22. During a recent interview with Newsweek, Lanahan said she first came across the paper dolls while exploring her mother's attic as a child.

  • New Haven Black history ready to be explored at Yale's Beinecke library (New Haven Register)

    November 14, 2022

    If there's one thing New Haven has plenty of, it's history — and for as long as there have been African Americans in New Haven, that history has been recorded along with the stories of all the ethnicities that call or have called New Haven home. Much of it has been recorded, catalogued and preserved by historical societies and libraries, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University which will provide an opportunity Sunday in conjunction with The Greater New Haven African American Historical Society for people to come in an explore.

  • Mississippi Revealed (NHK World Japan)

    October 28, 2022

    Journey with Cannon Hersey as he explores parallels between battles over voting rights today and the historic struggles of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. With his grandfather, famed writer John Hersey's groundbreaking "A Life for a Vote" as a roadmap, Cannon reveals how black farmers cultivated freedom by tending the earth, and are still striving to overcome a legacy of systemic oppression.

  • Beinecke Top Tens: The Waste Land

    October 25, 2022

    In honor of the centennial of T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land, here are ten Waste Land highlights from the Beinecke’s collections. 1...

  • III. Charting The Waste Land-Scape

    October 25, 2022

    The Waste Land can be thought of as a kind of “Land”-scape. As Pound predicted, the poem did indeed turn out to be “very important”: it has left an undeniable...