Literature & Literary Studies

Founded in 1900 by financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina Trask, Yaddo began receiving guests in 1926 and was immediately hailed by The New York Times as “a new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.” Since that inaugural season, Yaddo has navigated the roiled cultural and political life of 20th-century America while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Guston and Sylvia Plath.

This companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition traces Jack Kerouac's tumultuous and often traumatic journey from his working-class boyhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, to New York City, where he, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs would become the fathers of the Beat movement, and beyond. Drawing on journals, diaries, manuscripts, and typescripts in the Library's Jack Kerouac Archive--material never before seen by the general public, and only a very small proportion of which has been seen even by scholars--Beatific Soul explores Kerouac's evolution as a writer and his spiritual passage from Christianity to Buddhism and back again.

Walt Whitman's publication of Leaves of Grass, on July 4, 1855, stands as one of the more improbable achievements in American literary history. Nothing in the earlier writings of the thirty-six-year-old former Long Island schoolteacher, who himself received only six years of formal education, had suggested that he was capable of the revolutionary style or of the radically unorthodox combination of spiritual, sexual, and political sensibilities that make Leaves of Grass as much a prophetic teaching as a pioneering literary work. Today, 150 years after its first appearance, Leaves of Grass remains disturbingly honest and demanding, unique, and inimitable.

Pick up The New York Public Library Literature Companion to check the dates of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or to find out how James Joyce's Ulysses changed U.S. obscenity laws, and hours later you may find yourself absorbed in the imaginary worlds of Camelot and the Matrix or sidetracked by the fascinating history of The New Yorker. Designed to satisfy the curious browser as well as the serious researcher, this exciting new resource offers the most up-to-date information on literature available in English from around the world, from the invention of writing to the year 2000.