Promotional still of Elizabeth Taylor from ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at the age of 79, has connections to the Ransom Center holdings, ranging from the Mel Gussow collection to the Ernest Lehman collection.

The former New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, who died in 2005, wrote Elizabeth Taylor’s obituary. His obituary, with updated contributions from other reporters, was posthumously published today in the New York Times.

The Lehman collection, consisting of more than 2500 items, spans the forty year career of the screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, journalist, motion picture producer and director. Included in the collection are scripts, correspondence, photographs and other material from the production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of…

Russell Banks’s notes about his early experiences writing on a word processor.

Today it seems, with iPads and hybrid cars and 3-D blockbusters, technology advancements are, quite literally, right in our faces. Almost jaded by the constant onslaught, we expect constant development and easily adapt, rarely finding ourselves bewildered by new devices. This, however, was not always so.

American author Russell Banks’s 1989 novel Affliction, which in early drafts he titled “Dead of Winter,” was his first attempt to construct a work of fiction on a word processor. Used to typewriters or even plain pencil and paper, the word processor, with its editing capabilities such as formatting or spell check, offered a completely new experience.

In a page of typed notes…

Undated photo of Tennessee Williams. Unidentified photographer.

Among the material in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Becoming Tennessee Williams, is a picture of Tennessee Williams holding a photograph of Elia Kazan. Kazan was an American film and theater director, producer, screenwriter, and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio. In his theatrical career, Kazan became one of the most visible members of the New York elite, directing highly acclaimed plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder, among others. As a film director, he won two Academy Awards for best director and elicited award-winning performances from such actors as Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and James Dean.

Kazan is infamous for the testimony he gave to the House Un- American Activities Committee…

Stella Adler’s notes on the character of Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s play ‘The Glass Menagerie’.

Stella Adler was considered one of this country’s most important teachers of the principles of acting, character analysis, and script analysis. Adler began acting when she was just four years old, alongside her parents, Jacob and Sara Adler, in a production of the Yiddish play Broken Hearts by Z. Libin. Adler performed throughout her youth and young adult years in the New York Yiddish Theater, in which her parents were active. She later became associated with the Group Theatre through Harold Clurman, whom she married in 1943.

In 1934 Adler studied with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who would remain an important influence on her throughout…

Inside cover of Marlon Brando’s address book, which he lost during a 1949 production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’

“On bended knee I beg you to return this. I lost eight others already and if I lose this I’ll just drop dead!”

These are Marlon Brando’s words inscribed on the flyleaf of his address book, which was later dropped on the stage of the Barrymore Theatre in New York City during the 1949 run of A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando’s portrayal of the rugged and aggressive Stanley Kowalski in the play stands as the defining performance against which all subsequent actors of the part are judged.

In 1947, Brando auditioned for role. His audition was persuasive, and Tennessee Williams agreed to his casting…

‘Lark And Termite’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

Born in West Virginia in 1952, writer Jayne Anne Phillips published her first story collection in 1976. The publication of Black Tickets in 1979 prompted Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer to call Phillips “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty.” Phillips’s subsequent publications, which have been praised for their poetic prose and in-depth examinations of war and family dynamics, have continued to garner critical acclaim and major literary prizes, including her most recent novel, Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009. Materials related to Phillips and Lark and Termite are highlighted in the Ransom Center’s exhibition Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century.

Lark and Termite explores the effects of the…

Unidentified itinerant photographer, 'Barber Shop in the Nueces Hotel,' 1934. Gelatin silver glass plate negative.

The Ransom Center has made available online the digital collection “The Itinerant Photographer: Photographs of Corpus Christi Businesses in the 1930s.”

The collection highlights photographs taken of businesses in Corpus Christi during the Great Depression. The project to make these materials accessible online was funded by a TexTreasures grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.

Until now, access to the collection was limited, due to the fragility of the collection material and its uncataloged status. The Center has now constructed a Web site as a portal to…

Elizabeth Bowen. Unknown photographer, May 1953.

Stefania Porcelli of Libera Università- San Pio V in Rome, Italy, recently visited the Ransom Center on an Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf fellowship to research the Elizabeth Bowen collection. She shares some of her findings.

With the support of an Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf fellowship, I spent six weeks at the Harry Ransom Center this autumn, carrying out my project on Elizabeth Bowen’s attitude toward World War II and the language of propaganda, which also investigates her involvement in the “media ecology” of the time.

I worked mostly with unpublished material. Encouraged by Ransom Center Director Thomas Staley, and thanks to archivist Gabby Redwine’s help, I was able to access Bowen’s uncatalogued letters…

In this video clip from a 1978 interview, J. B. Colson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Fellow of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, asks Helmut Gernsheim about his letter collection of famous and contemporary photographers, including correspondence with George Bernard Shaw. In this clip, Gernsheim discusses how he asked Shaw 20 questions about his interest in photography and Shaw’s response.

View the exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection at the Harry Ransom Center through January 2. The galleries are open Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended Thursday hours until 7 p.m. On Saturdays and Sundays the galleries are open from noon to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed on Mondays.

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Andrew Scahill, of George Mason University, discusses his research on still photographer Jack Harris and the role of “still men” in Hollywood. Scahill’s research, “Cogs in the Dream Machine: Jack Harris and the Role of the ‘Still Man,’” was funded by the Robert De Niro Endowed Fund.

The Ransom Center is now receiving applications for its 2011–2012 research fellowships in the humanities. The application deadline is February 1, 2011, but applicants are encouraged, if necessary, to request information from curators by January 1. About 50 fellowships are awarded annually by the Ransom Center to support scholarly research projects in all areas of the humanities. Applicants must demonstrate the need for substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections.