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.

  • Windham-Campbell literary festival moves online with nine-episode salon

    September 14, 2021

    Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes have transformed their flagship fall literary festival into a virtual salon series showcasing the creativity of its 2021 recipients over the course of nine episodes streaming every Wednesday from Sept. 15 to Nov. 10. Each episode will highlight one of the eight prize recipients with the final episode featuring a keynote address by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo based on the theme “Why I Write.” One-time registration for all nine episodes is free and open to the public. The series will take its audience on an international literary tour of words, music, performance, and art.

  • The Classroom in Crisis (Boston Review)

    September 13, 2021

    Following Brooks’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the authors trace how the formalist emphasis of mid-twentieth-century New Criticism emerged less from first principles than from the realities of the classroom, where a text might be understood as a se

  • Getting Started

    September 3, 2021

    Research in American and African American Literature at Beinecke Library: Getting Started Archival research is fascinating and fun – but it can be complicated...

  • Juneteenth 2021 and the work still to do

    June 18, 2021

    Yale’s libraries and collections are another important source of educational enrichment and inspiration in the spirit of Juneteenth. For example, the Beinecke Library has a pair of films by Solomon Sir Jones that show Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Beinecke’s collections also include an address by Frederick Douglass delivered on April 16, 1883 in the Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. for the 21st anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia; and the gold pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

  • Queer Shoulders at the Wheel (Boston Review)

    May 21, 2021

    A lot of Wieners’s later writing is lost: much was never published, and though his papers are spread across several university collections, from which the letters in Yours Presently are drawn, many later manuscripts were in all likelihood lost after his death. But we know that Wieners continued producing elusive, obscure, often waspishly humorous texts for his own pleasure and sometimes for that of others. Some of these late poems appeared in o·blēk, The East Village, and Big Bridge, and others were mailed to his younger friend and last devoted Occult School member Lansing, and are therefore deposited in Lansing’s archives at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When Wieners died in 2002, at his side were his longtime supporters Shively and Jim Dunn.