News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

A Granted Prayer: An unpublished story by Edith Wharton (The Atlantic)
November 9, 2020
While doing postdoctoral research for a project on Edith Wharton’s short fiction, Sarah Whitehead, an independent scholar in London, came across the typescript of an unpublished story, titled “A Granted Prayer,” in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.
Words for the Nation: A Playlist of Readings from the Collections
November 2, 2020

Expecting to be waiting in line any time soon? Stressed and looking for prompts from the past for reflection in the present about paths for the future? For...
Reënacting the Trial of a Black Woman Convicted of Voter Fraud (The New Yorker)
November 2, 2020
“Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason,” a show about a woman accused of voter fraud, echoes Langston Hughes’s “The Ballot and Me.”
Rituals of Housekeeping, Memories of Home: On Marilynne Robinson’s First Novel (LitHub)
October 29, 2020
Robinson began working on the novel in the mid to late 1970s when she was establishing housekeeping herself, presumably in Seattle, Washington, where she was a student in the English PhD program. She also had two young sons and worked on the book at night, writing by hand while they were sleeping. Her notebooks from this period, housed in the archives of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, offer a sense of her life at the time.
'Lost' letters reveal JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson's mutual affection (The Guardian)
October 25, 2020
Dr Michael Shaw, a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Stirling, came across the letters while researching a box of correspondence at Beinecke Library in Yale University. The letters had been acquired by the collector Edwin J.Beinecke in the 1950s and were catalogued and listed in the library archive.
Claude McKay in Our Time: A Conversation with Gary Holcomb and William J. Maxwell on “Romance in Marseille” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
October 23, 2020
GEH: I didn’t discover the originally archived text. The shorter version has been available in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since the 1940s. Sometime along the way, the longer, probably later version appeared in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collection when his daughter, Hope Virtue McKay, contributed it, we think.
Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English, edited by Ann Kjelberg (The Irish Times)
October 17, 2020
Brodsky is one of few writers, like Larkin and MacNeice, who first allowed me to entertain the inconceivable notion that I too could actually enjoy poetry, rather than simply memorise it to answer Leaving Cert questions or quote from it so as to make other people feel inadequate (my understanding of poetry readers hitherto).
Art & Protest: A Conversation
October 14, 2020

See, download, and share poster From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street , Bolotnaya Square to Nuit debout , the Arab Spring , the Movement of the...
Beinecke director announces retirement after 30 years of library service (Yale Daily News)
October 13, 2020
After working within the Yale University Library system for more than 30 years and serving as the director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for 10 of those years, Edwin Schroeder, who goes by E.C., will retire Aug. 31, 2021.
Beinecke Library hosts Emily Wilson, translator of the “Odyssey” (Yale Daily News)
October 11, 2020
On Wednesday, translator Emily Wilson GRD ’01 delivered the 2020 edition of the Mark Strand Memorial Reading, where she read from her in-progress translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus” on a Zoom webinar. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hosts the Mark Strand Memorial Reading Series and invites accomplished American poets to read their work.
Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report
October 9, 2020

The Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report, including stories, statistics, and selected recent acquisitions, can be read and downloaded here: Beinecke...
How I Met the Reclusive Georgia O’Keeffe (The New Yorker)
October 1, 2020
"And so I began the project. I did much of the archival research at the Beinecke Library, at Yale, which holds the vast O’Keeffe-Stieglitz archive. There, I worked in tranquil silence within the alabaster walls, leafing through papers and photographs; reading long, chatty, private, serious, funny, heartfelt, and thoughtful letters; learning a complicated network of kinship, friendships, and professional relationships. I enjoyed those times enormously."
The Ballot and Me by Langston Hughes: An Historical Sequence, 1956
October 1, 2020

The Langston Hughes Papers are the single most consulted collection in the Beinecke Library’s vast archives. Part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial...
Carrie Langston: An Important Suffragist Everyone Should Know (Washington Informer)
September 30, 2020
Virtual Teaching with Beinecke Library Collections
September 24, 2020

Teaching on-site with the collections is a priority for the Beinecke Library. Direct encounters with materials fulfill a mission of encouraging students to...
Workshop inspired creative expression in cellblocks
September 24, 2020
When a student named Justin wrote pieces for a creative writing workshop offered by the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) this summer, he felt like he was sharing his heart with the world. The workshop, which was offered to inmates at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institute in Suffield, Connecticut, made him feel his heart was “treated as a heart should be,” Justin said.
While many festivals transition online, Windham-Campbell transitions to print (Yale Daily News)
September 18, 2020
Because the COVID-19 pandemic rendered this year’s in-person Windham-Campbell Festival impossible, organizers are exploring new ways to celebrate the prize winners.
A joy glimpsed: Introducing an unpublished story by Edith Wharton (TLS)
September 18, 2020
“The Children’s Hour”, which has remained unpublished until now, charts an afternoon in the life of a Catholic priest.
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive: A conversation with Nancy Kuhl.(Choice Reviews)
September 15, 2020
Nancy Kuhl, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, talks with Choice about the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, an online archive documenting the prolific lives of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.
With festival cancelled, Windham-Campbell Prizes find new ways to celebrate
September 11, 2020
In a typical year, the 2020 recipients of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes would visit campus this month for a three-day festival to share their work and celebrate the written word with the local community. With this year’s festival cancelled due to the pandemic, the prize’s organizers have found a new way to honor the eight recipients and their craft. The celebration will instead combine an original lecture by a legendary writer with a special edition of one of the country’s most prestigious literary journals. Renowned science fiction author and literary critic Samuel R. Delany will deliver a keynote address as was originally planned. His lecture, based on the theme “Why I Write,” will be presented online on Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 5 p.m. ET