A case of materials from the Commentary magazine archive is on display in the lobby for the Morris Dickstein lecture. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

In conjunction with tonight’s lecture by author Morris Dickstein, an accompanying display case in the Ransom Center’s lobby features items from the Center’s Commentary magazine archive. Dickstein’s lecture, titled “America’s Best Magazine?: Commentary in the 1960s,” takes place tonight at 7 p.m. in the Prothro Theater. The Commentary magazine archive was donated to the Center in 2011.

Materials on display include a 1961 subscriber survey, a 1986 exchange of letters between Allen Ginsberg and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, and the May 1952 issue of the magazine, which contains the first American publication of “Diary of Anne Frank.”

This program is co-sponsored by…

Cover of the February 1960 issue of Commentary magazine.

Author Morris Dickstein presents the lecture “America’s Best Magazine?: Commentary in the 1960s” this Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m. at the Harry Ransom Center. In 2011, Commentary magazine donated its archive to the Center, and the collection is now open for research.

Founded in November 1945, shortly after World War II, Commentary was established to reconnect assimilated American Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader Jewish community and to bring the ideas of young Jewish intellectuals to a wider audience.

Throughout its history, Commentary has published significant articles on historical, political, cultural, and theological issues in addition to fiction and memoirs. The magazine became a major outlet for leading figures to establish their intellectual careers. The archive spans from 1945…

April 1, 1965, letter to J. M. Coetzee from C. L. Cline, Chairman of the Department of English at The University of Texas.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and graduated from the University of Cape Town. After working three years as a computer programmer in England, he enrolled in The University of Texas at Austin in 1965 to pursue his Ph.D. in English, linguistics and Germanic languages, which he earned in 1969. While at the University, he conducted research in the Ransom Center’s collections for his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

Coetzee’s archive now resides in the Ransom Center and is available for research.
Below, Coetzee writes of his association with The University of…

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Basketball, which began as a game invented to occupy young, energetic boys within the confines of a gymnasium on rainy days, has come to be one of the most popular sports in American culture.

Basketball: Power in Play, a display of sports photographs from the Harry Ransom Center’s New York Journal-American collection, captures some of the key components of the game from the 1940s through the 1960s.

From September 18 through December 9, 2012, visitors will be able to view images depicting various perspectives on the game such as training and technique, women in basketball, wheelchair basketball, the Harlem Globetrotters, and images of incredible shots and blunders.

The 32 black-and-white photographs in the exhibition come from the New York Journal-American, which was published from 1937 to 1968. Soon after the newspaper’s demise, the Ransom Center gained ownership of the paper’s approximately two million prints and one million negatives. Many of the photographs in the display show original crop and edit marks used in the course of publication.

Geared toward sports enthusiasts, the rich history and engaging narratives embodied in the photo captions will be sure to entertain and amuse.

The display is one of several exhibitions and events across The University of Texas at Austin campus this fall capturing the spirit and history of basketball from its beginnings in a Massachusetts YMCA to the modern NBA.

Courtesy of Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, the University’s Blanton Museum of Art will be presenting James Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball,” the 1891 document that outlines the 13 original rules of the game. The rules will be exhibited alongside the works of contemporary artist Paul Pfeiffer in The Rules of Basketball: Works by Paul Pfeiffer and James Naismith’s Original Rules of Basket Ball, running through January 13, 2013.

The H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports will host a symposium during the fall 2012 semester about the history and cultural significance of basketball.

Former undergraduate intern Rachel Platis selected the content for the Ransom Center’s display.

The materials are on view in the Ransom Center’s lobby during exhibition gallery hours and in the third-floor Director’s Gallery, Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Obstacle Course (Shimer College basketball team practice). Unidentified photographer, "New York Journal-American," January 26, 1964.

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The acquisition of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s archive by the Ransom Center is a fitting tribute to the writer’s long-standing ties to The University of Texas at Austin and, in a way, brings his relationship with the University full circle.

Coetzee enrolled in the University in 1965, and he earned his Ph.D. in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages in 1968. While at the University, he conducted research in the Ransom Center’s collections for his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

In a 1984 essay for the New York Times titled “How I Learned About America—and Africa—in Texas,” Coetzee writes about working in the collections at the Ransom Center:

“In the Manuscripts Room of the library, I found the exercise books in which Samuel Beckett had written “Watt” on a farm in the south of France, hiding out from the Germans. I spent weeks perusing them, pondering the sketches and numbers and doodles in the margins, disconcerted to find the well-attested agony of composing a masterpiece had left no other traces than these flippancies. Was the pain perhaps all in the waiting, I asked myself, in the sitting and staring at the empty page?”

Once the Coetzee archive is cataloged, students will have access to Coetzee’s own papers for scholarly work and perhaps will explore some of these same questions about the writer’s process.

Coetzee was on campus during the Charles Whitman shooting in 1966, and in the same essay, he recalls hiding under a desk during the ordeal. He also recalls happier times on campus spent with cricket teammates and traveling to College Station to play the Aggie team, also composed mostly of students from colonial countries. Coetzee lived in Austin with his wife during those three years, and their son Nicholas was born here.

Coetzee returned to the University as a guest of the linguistics department and again in 1995 to teach students in the MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers. Student evaluations from his time at the Michener Center are included among his papers, and the anonymous responses are almost unanimous in their praise.

“John Coetzee has an astonishing mind,” wrote one student.

“I feel very fortunate to have had him as a teacher,” wrote another. “His intellect is world-class. I admire his writing as well as his teaching. He parses meaning with rather exquisite precision, displays humor, never loses the larger sense. He has high standards but was always approachable. He guided classroom discussions with a light hand—they were spontaneous but not chaotic. He was, in short, very great—interesting and interested.”

The Texas Exes, the alumni organization for The University of Texas at Austin, awarded Coetzee the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2004.

Coetzee returned to the University once more in May 2010 to give a talk as part of the Graduate School’s 1910 Society Lecture Series, which celebrated the 100^th anniversary of the school.

In his talk, Coetzee said of his time in Austin: “My free hours I spent in the library, which I cannot praise more highly than to say it did not know all the treasures it contained.”

Scholars, researchers, and students will no doubt be mining the Coetzee archive in the coming years in search of the many treasures that it contains.

J. M. Coetzee signs the authors' door at the Ransom Center during a visit in May 2010. Photo by Pete Smith.