Posts by Anne Garner

When Edward Estlin Cummings met Marion Morehouse in 1932, he was in the middle of a painful split from his second wife, Anne Barton. But loss soon gave way to what Cummings later described as "an ecstatic arrival." This was Marion.

In his essay “King Weirdo,” anthologized in the collection Now Dig This, the American humorist Terry Southern writes about his first encounter with Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection has made the papers of Paul Auster, dating from the years 1999-2005, available to the public. This installment of Auster’s papers joins an existing collection already in the Berg, dating from 1963-1995, and a third installment, bridging the gap between the two collections, from 1995-1999. Guides to all the papers are now available to researchers at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (researchers can also email us for a copy at brgref@nypl.org.

Elif Batuman tells a story in her recently published The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, about visiting Tolstoy's estate Yasnaya Polyana for a conference.   A visiting historian presenting at the conference is researching the marginalia in Tolstoy's personal library. Another scholar asks him about it one morning at breakfast. Oh, there aren't any words, he says. Tolstoy doesn't write in any of his books. But the pages. They fall open in certain places!
 

As Edmund Blunden's biographer tells it, the poets Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon sat down together on the night of November 7, 1929 to annotate a book. That book was Robert Graves’ memoir Goodbye to All That, and their notes were anything but laudatory.

In Chapter 18 of Candide, our hero and his valet Cacambo arrive in the utopian kingdom of El Dorado, where the streets glitter with precious stones. The people of El Dorado speak Cacambo's mother tongue, a Peruvian dialect indecipherable to Candide, and Cacambo becomes the sole communicator and interpreter. Candide relies on his valet to communicate with the natives of this strange and beguiling country.

For many years, William S. Burroughs sent Otto Belue of Saint Louis, Missouri a Christmas card with a check in it. The cards arrived like clockwork, from London, Paris, New York…wherever Burroughs had landed at the time. Letters in the William S. Burroughs Collection of Papers sent by Belue in late December and early January during the sixties and early seventies to Burroughs offer interesting insight into one of Burroughs’s strongest ties from childhood.

Richard Wilbur published his first poem, "Puppies" in 1929 in the children's magazine John Martin’s Book at the age of 8. In the eighty years since, Wilbur, Poet Laureate from 1987-1988, has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and outlived more famous poet contemporaries like John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. These poets' Confessional style caught fire mid-century and signalled a departure from the measured poetry Wilbur was writing. A Wilbur poem foregoes the stormy revelations of the Confessionalists; more often it betrays instead the delight and solace to be found in the things of this world (not for nothing the name of Wilbur's National Book Award-winning third 

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection has posted the finding aid for the William S. Burroughs Papers. A guide to the papers can now be accessed here (pdf). 

The archive is a swirl of 1960s political, popular and literary culture, offering a close look at a cross-section of social revolutions that caught fire in the late fifties and sixties, including the rise of drugs, the gay liberation movement, free speech and the development of Scientology. Here too, are many of the era’s most innovative artists, thinkers and experimental writers. Burroughs's correspondents include Paul Bowles, Mary Beach & Claude Pelieu, David Budd, Truman Capote, Gregory Corso, Brion 

Ever wonder what Jack Kerouac was doing at ages fourteen, fifteen and sixteen? Competing, for one. The author played on a neighborhood baseball team and was skilled enough in high school football that he was offered scholarships to play at both Boston University and at Columbia (he later accepted the New York school’s offer, a choice that ensured his path crossed with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, among others here).

As a teenager, Kerouac was also at work inventing his own fantasy field of dreams. In his free time, the young writer founded a complicated fantasy baseball league, as well as a Thoroughbred horseracing circuit. Kerouac recorded 

The plot of Linda Fairstein’s Lethal Legacy, set in the New York Public Library‘s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, pivots on a copy of a rare 1866 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1866 marks the year of the earliest approved edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, illustrated by Punch cartoonist John Tenniel. Copies of the 1866 edition in the New York Public Library are in the double digits. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of American Literature alone has seven copies, including Alice Pleasance Liddell’s copy of the book, bound and inscribed for her by the author.

Alice Liddell was one of three of the daughters of Dr. H.G. 

Flannery O'Connor, who would have been 84 today, is best known for her dystopic portrayals of the South and Southerners in her novels Wise Blood, and The Violent Bear it Away, and in short stories like "The Displaced Person" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. She died in 1964 at the age of 39 from complications related to lupus. O’Connor’s characters were more often than not non-believers; folks you'd be more likely to see in the wee hours of Sunday morning by the side of the road than in the front pew. In her work, however, the author returned again and again to religious themes, drawing on extensive theological reading and her