Do I contradict myself?
Very well then … . I contradict myself;
I am large … . I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855
Founded in 1911 when Yale College graduate Owen Franklin Aldis donated his distinguished library of first editions of American fiction, drama, and poetry to the Yale Library, the Collection of American Literature is one of the most important collections of its kind. In the century following Aldis’s gift, the Collection has continued to grow, building on core areas and expanding to include complementary materials, from individual manuscripts to expansive literary archives, from little magazines and lively ephemera to high-tech artists’ books. In 2011, collection highlights wer exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911 – 2011. This exhibition revealed areas of bibliographic strength and new development while demonstrating the Collection’s extraordinary richness, eclecticism, and depth. From the colonial period to the present, the Collection celebrates American Literature as a living art form with a complex history. Its evolving and vibrant traditions are a subject worthy of rigorous scholarly attention as well as leisurely pursuit for the general reader.
Collection Strengths & Highlights
James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection
Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts in the JWJ Collection
Nineteenth-Century American Literature
African American Writers’ Archives
Literary Intellectuals at Yale
African American Arts and Letters
Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture
Modernism and the Little Magazine
Image, Text, and the Art of the Book
