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.

  • Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)

    January 13, 2024

    King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

  • Writing and Resistance: 2024 Black History Month Display

    January 8, 2024

    Materials related to a temporary display on the Beinecke Library mezzanine, January 8 - March 18, 2024, for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Black History Month, and in conjunction with the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, 2024) and the exhibition Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, on view from mid-February at the New Haven Museum.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Louise Glück, Nobel laureate and beloved Yale mentor

    October 13, 2023

    Louise Glück, a poet whose evocative voice shaped the literary world for decades, earning her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, and who became a beloved teacher and mentor as a member of the Yale faculty, died Oct. 13 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80.

  • Pondering the power of art in protest

    September 26, 2023

    “Art, Protest, & the Archives,” an exhibition at the Beinecke Library, explores the connections between dissent and artistic expression over the past century.