Charles R. Larson. Photo by Roberta Rubenstein.

Tonight, Charles R. Larson of American University speaks about his collection of African, African American, and Native American literature, acquired by the Harry Ransom Center in 2009. Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas at Austin emeritus professor of English, hosts the conversation, which will be webcast live. Here Larson shares how he became interested in African literature and began collecting.

This collection of books and manuscripts would not exist if I had not gone to Nigeria in 1962 as a Peace Corps volunteer. Prior to my departure, I had earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in American literature and written my thesis on William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy. I fully intended to return to the United States and…

Books from David Foster Wallace’s library. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

Jacqueline Muñoz, librarian at the Ransom Center, cataloged more than 300 books from David Foster Wallace’s archive. Here, she writes about her experience working with the collection and her personal response to Wallace’s work.

I didn’t think much of Infinite Jest in the beginning. My impression of David Foster Wallace’s writing was that it was wordy and unfocused with some seriously flawed characters. Gradually I settled into his use of language, which is quite impressive, and finally at the Boston AA section, I was hooked—certainly on the plot, but even more so on the man behind the prose. All at once, it was clear the length of the story and ambiguity of the…

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The David Foster Wallace papers have been cataloged and are now available for study in the Ransom Center’s reading room. Since last March when the Center announced its acquisition of the papers, a few small collections have arrived that complement the archive acquired from Wallace’s Estate.

Just weeks after we announced the acquisition, the Ransom Center was contacted by Steve Kleinedler, supervising editor of American Heritage Dictionary (AHD). Wallace was a member of the AHD usage panel, a group of individuals AHD consulted about issues related to usage and grammar. Each year, AHD sends a survey or “usage ballot” of questions to its board members—asking, for example, the acceptable use of specific words—and the responses influence how AHD defines appropriate usage in its dictionaries. Wallace, whose facility with language was exceptional, was enthusiastic about serving on the AHD usage panel, and his survey responses demonstrate how seriously he took his role. Though most of the questions were designed so that they could be answered with a mere check mark, the six usage ballots that Wallace completed are covered with his comments and questions. AHD sent the Ransom Center copies of David Foster Wallace’s usage ballots, and a few sample pages can be seen in the slideshow above.

Within days of hearing from AHD about their Wallace materials, the Ransom Center received a call from Jay Jennings, the former editor of Tennis Magazine, who in 1996 commissioned Wallace to write an article about the U.S. Open (published as “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open”). The editor had a file of corrected proofs and correspondence related to the article that he wanted to contribute to the archive. These papers provide a wonderful example of how involved Wallace was in the editorial process. Wallace had warned the editor that he would be a difficult editee, but the papers demonstrate the contrary. Though Wallace’s comments on the proof pages are often assertive, they are equally good-natured, dotted throughout with smiley faces, and oftentimes showing his humor. A sample page can be seen in the above slideshow.

Both of these collections were donated to the Ransom Center by individuals who admired Wallace’s work and felt compelled to make a contribution to his archive. This generosity of spirit is characteristic of the enthusiastic and very personal responses the Ransom Center has received from a number of devoted readers of Wallace’s works over the past several months, readers who wanted to give something back to the community in honor of a writer they admired deeply.

Page 1 of corrected proof of David Foster Wallace's 1996 essay on the U.S. Open for 'Tennis Magazine.'

Opening page of corrected proof of Wallace’s 1996 essay ‘Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise’ for Harper’s magazine.

The archive of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of Infinite Jest (1996), The Broom of the System (1987), Girl with Curious Hair (1989) and numerous collections of stories and essays, is now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid for the collection and an inventory of Wallace’s library can be accessed online.

The Ransom Center acquired Wallace’s archive last year. The collection is made up of 42 boxes and is divided into three main sections: works, personal and career-related materials and copies of works by Don DeLillo. The works section covers the period between 1984 and 2006 and includes material related to Wallace’s novels,…

A selection of discs from Denis Johnson’s collection. The handwritten note points out that ‘These discs are the only copies of any drafts from before 1992.’ Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

As an avid reader of Denis Johnson’s work (I bought my first Playboy magazine to read Nobody Move in serial form), I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go through his papers. Seeing Johnson speak at the 2008 Flair Symposium, “Creating a Usable Past: Writers, Archives, & Institutions,” had amplified, for me at least, the desire to know as much as one can about a favorite author. Flair’s intimate venue and Johnson’s candidness about his own archive gave mystique to his lost work and to what he has decided to…

Denis Johnson speaks on a panel at the Ransom Center's 2008 Flair Symposium on 'Building the Archive.' Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

The Ransom Center has acquired the papers of National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, author of Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke.

The collection includes manuscripts, typescripts, research materials, journals, correspondence, family photos and juvenilia, press clippings, books, and other items. Many of Johnson’s pre-1992 works exist only in digital form, and bundles of floppy disks with manuscript drafts are part of the archive. An early scrapbook includes baby footprints, Johnson’s birth certificate, family photos and correspondence between Johnson and his family.

A German translation of James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wehg' ('Finnegans Wake'). Photo by Pete Smith.

Walter Wetzels, an emeritus professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, recently donated a German translation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to the Ransom Center. He shares a bit of his history with the text.

It must be more than 50 years ago after reading my first novel in English (that was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel) that I very ambitiously tried the famous and feared James Joyce. And, of all things, I chose Finnegans Wake. Little did I know what to expect, and—predictably—it turned out to be a disaster. I felt completely defeated and asked myself whether the English that…

Major and minor doctoral theses manuscripts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Photo by Pete Smith.

The Ransom Center has acquired the manuscripts of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major and minor doctoral theses. The typed theses, annotated with handwritten corrections, were presented by Lévi-Strauss at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1948 upon completion of his doctorate in humanities. Lévi-Strauss’s major thesis, “Les structures élémentaires de la parenté,” was published in English as “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” in 1949. In the thesis, he proposed the “alliance theory,” a structuralist model for the anthropological study of relations and kinship. His minor thesis, “La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara” (”The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians”), is an ethnography of an indigenous…

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A few weeks ago, the Ransom Center received as a gift an unusual volume to add to our holdings of hard-boiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961). Kevin Berger, a journalist from New York, donated this booklet, which Hammett wrote for the U.S. military while he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands off the Alaska Peninsula during World War II. Berger’s father was a draftsman who also served in the Aleutians, and Berger had found the volume among his father’s drawings. We enthusiastically accepted the gift knowing that it would remedy what we call a “want”—a gap in our holdings. The Ransom Center is an important research site for scholars of Hammett in part because we have a small collection of Hammett’s papers and the massive archive of his longtime lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman. This gift is a boon to Hammett scholars not just because it fills a bibliographical gap, but because the Hammett papers, it turns out, contain a series of letters Hammett wrote to Hellman while stationed in the Aleutians.

In June 1942, the Japanese attacked a United States military base in Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island and went on to occupy two far western islands in the Aleutian chain. After more than a year of air, sea, and land battles fought in brutal conditions, the United States defeated the Japanese in July 1943. Hammett was posted to the island of Adak almost immediately after the crisis ended. From that time on, the island was under little threat of invasion, and Hammett was assigned to keep the 50,000 troops stationed in the islands informed of current affairs through an official newspaper, The Adakian—a sleepy journalistic assignment, since news arrived in this remote outpost well out of date. As part of his work, Hammett composed the history The Battle of the Aleutians in September 1943, a project for which he and his collaborators received a commendation. Its narrative has the feel of hard-boiled suspense writing, as in this passage describing the U.S. preparing for a counter-attack:

And then trouble came, a williwaw, the sudden wild wind of the Aleutians. Nobody knows how hard the wind can blow along these islands where the Bering meets the Pacific….The first morning the wind stopped landing operations with only a portion of our force ashore and, by noon, had piled many of the landing boats on the beach. The men ashore had no tents, no shelters of any kind. They dug holes in the ground and crawled into them for protection against wind and rain and cold. When the wind had quieted enough to let the others come ashore, they too dug holes and lived like that while the cold, wet and backbreaking work of unloading ships by means of small boats went on. And they did what they had to do. They built an airfield. They built an airfield in twelve days.

Hammett undertook related projects such as working at the radio station, offering film screenings, and delivering evening lectures on current events.

The famous writer was admired by his young staff at the newspaper and was himself an appealing curiosity for an isolated community often suffering from low morale. In letters to Lillian Hellman, he wrote detailed descriptions of life in the Aleutians; in the example shown here, he covers subjects such as his living conditions, his Texan bunkmate, Fred Astaire, and his thoughts on another work of war writing by Ralph Ingersoll. Biographer Diane Johnson (whose research materials on Hammett are part of her archive at the Ransom Center) writes that “if there were a happiest year for Hammett, it might have been this one, 1944.” Despite the austere landscape and the lack of news—not to mention fresh food—he stopped drinking and found himself to be unusually content. Hammett remained stationed in Adak—interrupted by a brief, unhappy period at Fort Richardson on the mainland—until the summer of 1945.

Hammett’s decision to enlist had seemed strange to those close to him—he was almost 50, he had long suffered from tuberculosis, and he had a well-known distaste for mainstream American politics. But his hatred of fascism was stronger, and he performed the service he was assigned with vigor, as this little booklet shows. As Diane Johnson tells it, a confusion over Hammett’s given name may be the only reason he made it to the Aleutians in the first place: over the course of several months in 1943, the office of J. Edgar Hoover issued memos to the General Staff office seeking validation of a rumor that Hammett—a known Communist Party sympathizer—had somehow made his way into the U. S. Military, but they assured him there was no such serviceman. The fact was only confirmed in 1945. By that time, Hammett had been reassigned, and the magic of Adak was over. He returned to drinking and after a short time requested a discharge; he officially left the military in August 1945.

The Battle of the Aleutians: A Graphic History, 1941–1943 (Headquarters Western Defence Command: Detachment 29th Engineers, 1944). With text by Cpl. Dashiell Hammett, captions by Cpl. Robert Colodny, and illustrations by Sgt. Harry Fletcher.

Anthony and Bertram Rota. Photo courtesy of Bertram Rota Booksellers.

The Ransom Center notes with great sorrow the death of Anthony Bertram Rota on December 13, 2009. As managing director and chairman of Bertram Rota Ltd, the London-based antiquarian bookseller was greatly influential in shaping the Center’s renowned holdings of the papers of numerous nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first–century British writers. Over a succession of five Ransom Center directors, the firm sold more than 500 collections to the Center, including the personal papers of several writing dynasties, notably those of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Theodore Francis, Llewellyn, and John Cowper Powys.

In his memoir, Books in the Blood (Oak Knoll Press, 2002), Anthony Rota recalled his annual travels to the United States:…