In 1995 the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library acquired the papers of the acclaimed Mex­i­can author Car­los Fuentes (1928–2012), whose pass­ing on May 15 has been marked inter­na­tion­ally by all who admired his major con­tri­bu­tions to mod­ern lit­er­a­ture and his role as a cul­tural and polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor on Latin Amer­ica, past and present. The Car­los Fuentes Papers con­tain more than 125 lin­ear feet of mate­ri­als, includ­ing note­books, man­u­scripts of nov­els and novel­las, short sto­ries, plays, screen­plays, non­fic­tion writ­ings, speeches, trans­la­tions, cor­re­spon­dence, draw­ings, doc­u­ments, pho­tographs, mag­netic media, scrap­books, cor­re­spon­dence, and other research mate­ri­als dat­ing from the 1940s to 1990s. When the acqui­si­tion of the papers was first announced, the Mex­i­can polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Jorge Cas­tañeda (Class of 1973) said, “Car­los Fuentes’s cor­re­spon­dence, manu­scripts, and other papers read like a mod­ern his­tory of the region’s litera­ture, pol­i­tics, and per­sonal rela­tion­ships. The author’s involve­ment in all facets of Latin Amer­i­can life, his friend­ships with polit­i­cal and lit­er­ary fig­ures from all over the world, his trav­els, and nearly a half-century of writ­ing make his per­sonal papers a trove of infor­ma­tion, opin­ions, sto­ries, and his­tory for lit­er­ary crit­ics, his­to­ri­ans, and polit­i­cal scien­tists of all persuasions.”

Fuentes was the author of La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra nos­tra (1975), and El gringo viejo (1985), as well as many other nov­els, plays, screen­plays, short sto­ries, essays, crit­i­cism, and works of jour­nal­ism dur­ing his long lit­er­ary career. He was a lead­ing fig­ure in the lit­er­ary “Boom” of the 1960s, when pre­vi­ously unknown Latin Amer­i­can writ­ers began attract­ing inter­national audi­ences both in the orig­i­nal Span­ish and in transla­tion. Well doc­u­mented in his papers is the story of how Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture rose from its regional roots to acquire an inter­na­tional sta­tus, which has been rec­og­nized in part by the con­fer­ral of five Nobel Prizes in lit­er­a­ture since 1967. The Chilean nov­el­ist José Donoso (Class of 1951) once called Fuentes “the first active and con­scious agent of the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the Span­ish Amer­i­can novel.” Fre­quently hon­ored in Latin Amer­ica and the United States, Fuentes received the pres­ti­gious Miguel de Cer­vantes Award from King Juan Car­los of Spain in 1988. Fuentes lived in Prince­ton from 1979 to 1980, when he was as a Fel­low in the Human­i­ties and worked on his novel Una familia lejana (1980). Like his father Rafael Fuentes Boet­tiger, Car­los Fuentes was a diplo­mat. He served in var­i­ous capac­i­ties in Mex­ico dur­ing the 1950s and later as ambas­sador to France from 1975 to 1977. He was a mem­ber of Mexico’s National Com­mis­sion on Human Rights and was active in the search for peace in Cen­tral Amer­ica. Pol­i­tics and lit­er­a­ture are inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined in the life and work of Car­los Fuentes, as with so many other Latin Amer­i­can writ­ers. Com­mon themes emerg­ing in the papers of Latin Amer­i­can authors since the 1960s are mil­i­tarism and dicta­torship, human rights and exile, left– and right-wing pol­i­tics, and his­tor­i­cal rela­tions with the United States.

Car­los Fuentes had been been the sub­ject of scores of mono­graphs and dis­ser­ta­tions, even before his papers became avail­able for research at Prince­ton. Access to his papers has per­mit­ted hun­dreds of Princeton-based and vis­it­ing schol­ars to study the evo­lu­tion of par­tic­u­lar works from con­cept to pub­lished book, while shed­ding light on the devel­op­ment of Fuentes’s com­plex narra­tive style, the influ­ence of pop­u­lar cul­ture, the transforma­tion of prose into cin­ema, and other sub­jects. In addi­tion to lit­er­a­ture, major cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal cur­rents are doc­u­mented in Fuentes’s exten­sive cor­re­spon­dence with lead­ing ­authors, intellec­tuals, film direc­tors, pub­lish­ers, and polit­i­cal figures­. Over the past fif­teen years, the Car­los Fuentes Papers have been one of the most heav­ily used Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­ary archives in the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion. Hold­ings have grown to more than sixty author archives and rela­tion col­lec­tions, includ­ing Reinaldo Are­nas, José Bianco, Guillermo Cabr­era Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Emir Rodríguez Mone­gal, Ale­jan­dra Pizarnik, and Mario Var­gas Llosa (Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, 2010). The acqui­si­tion of Car­los Fuentes’s papers opened the door to the acqui­si­tion of other major Mex­i­can author archives, such as Juan Gar­cía Ponce, Elena Garro, Margo Glantz, Jorge Ibargüen­goitia, Vicente Leñero, Ser­gio Pitol, and Ale­jan­dro Rossi. For a list­ing, go to http://firestone.princeton.edu/latinam/literarymss.php.  For ref­er­ence assis­tance about Princeton’s hold­ings, con­tact .

The Car­los Fuentes Papers were recently fea­tured in Reforma. To read the arti­cle, please click here.

Car­los Fuentes, Liv­er­pool St., Mex­ico City, 1967. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

From left to right: Car­los Mon­siváis, José Luis Cuevas, Fer­nando Benítez, and Car­los Fuentes, Opera Bar, Mex­ico City, 1969. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Man­u­scripts Divi­sion has recently received a large por­tion of the per­sonal papers of Mor­ris “Moe” Berg (1902–1972) as a gift from Dr. William Sear. Berg is best known as a Major League Base­ball player who became a spy dur­ing World War II and par­tic­i­pated in a plot that almost resulted in the assas­si­na­tion of the Ger­man physi­cist and Nobel lau­re­ate Werner Heisen­berg in 1945. The Moe Berg Papers offer researchers a glimpse into his mys­te­ri­ous life and com­plex personality.

Born in Harlem to Jew­ish immi­grants, Berg spent his child­hood in the Roseville sec­tion of Newark, New Jer­sey. At Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, Berg played short­stop on the uni­ver­sity base­ball team while study­ing sev­eral lan­guages. He became cap­tain of the base­ball team his senior year, and just before he grad­u­ated magna cum laude in June 1923, he accepted an offer to play for the Brook­lyn Robins (later the Brook­lyn Dodgers). He went on to play catcher for four Major League teams. Between sea­sons, he stud­ied at the Sor­bonne and Colum­bia Law. As a player, Berg was bet­ter known as “Pro­fes­sor Moe,” the most learned man in base­ball, than for his exploits on the field. The scout Mike Gon­za­lez coined the phrase “good field, no hit” for Berg in the early 1920s, though Berg did accom­pany Babe Ruth to Japan for an all-star expo­si­tion tour in 1934.

Gal­va­nized by the Japan­ese attack on Pearl Har­bor, Berg left base­ball in Jan­u­ary 1942 for a post under Nel­son A. Rock­e­feller in the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), work­ing in South Amer­ica. In 1944 he was accepted into the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS), where he spent the next two years report­ing on sci­en­tific advance­ments being made by Ger­many and Italy.

Berg returned to the United States after the war. He drifted from place to place, ulti­mately liv­ing with his sib­lings in Newark. He never mar­ried or held another full-time job, and main­tained a secre­tive and soli­tary lifestyle until his death on May 29, 1972.

The Moe Berg Papers con­sist of cor­re­spon­dence, hand­writ­ten notes, pho­tographs, news­pa­per clip­pings, finan­cial mate­ri­als, and items about Berg col­lected by oth­ers. Offi­cial cor­re­spon­dence, which com­prise the bulk of the papers, relates mainly to Berg’s time with the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices. Many of the mate­ri­als are car­bon copies of let­ters and doc­u­men­ta­tion sent by gov­ern­ment pouch dur­ing World War II, as well as drafts of cables, offi­cial orders, and sci­en­tific doc­u­men­ta­tion acquired for or dur­ing Berg’s many assign­ments. The col­lec­tion includes let­ters from Nel­son A. Rock­e­feller, Van­nevar Bush, and Gen­eral Leslie R. Groves, as well as love let­ters from Berg’s only known long-term roman­tic inter­est, Estella Huni.

The Papers also con­tain Berg’s copi­ous notes from the 1930s through the 1960s, which range from scrib­bled names and dates to elab­o­rate mem­oirs. Some notes relate directly to his gov­ern­ment work; oth­ers record his social life, trac­ing a vast net­work of friends in all capac­i­ties of base­ball, gov­ern­ment and law, and soci­ety on the East Coast. Notes on lin­guis­tics and books Berg read reflect his con­tin­ued inter­est in aca­d­e­mic pur­suits, while later notes con­tain auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal reflections.

Finally, the photographs—snapshots, pro­fes­sional press images, and copy prints from the 1980s—capture the events and peo­ple most com­monly asso­ci­ated with Moe Berg: his base­ball career, pre-war trips to Japan, expe­ri­ences abroad dur­ing World War II, and his rela­tion­ships with friends and fam­ily, includ­ing fel­low base­ball play­ers Babe Ruth, “Lefty” O’Doul, Joe Cronin, and Hol­lis Thurston.

The Moe Berg Papers were fea­tured in a recent arti­cle in the Prince­ton Alumni Weekly, and selected items are cur­rently on dis­play as part of the exhi­bi­tion “A Fine Addi­tion: New & Notable Acqui­si­tions in Princeton’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions” in the Main Gallery of Fire­stone Library. The Papers join sev­eral other Moe Berg col­lec­tions at Prince­ton: the Moe Berg Col­lec­tion (AC326) and the Dr. and Mrs. Arnold S. Bre­it­bart Col­lec­tion on Moe Berg (AC388), both at the Mudd Man­u­script Library.

Berg, right, with player-manager and friend Joe Cronin in the Boston Red Sox dugout, circa 1937. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Berg poses with Allied mil­i­tary offi­cials in Oslo, Nor­way, in June 1945. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Peck Shah­namah (Islamic MSS, 3rd series, no. 310), which is the finest Per­sian illu­mi­nated man­u­script among nearly 10,000 Islamic man­u­scripts in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library, is the most recent addi­tion to the Prince­ton Dig­i­tal Library of Islamic Man­u­scripts. This sump­tu­ous man­u­script of the Per­sian national epic Shah­namah, or “Book of Kings,” was writ­ten and illu­mi­nated in Safavid Per­sia. From the 16th to 18th cen­turies, the Safavid dynas­try ruled a far-flung empire that extended from Turkey to the Indian sub­con­ti­nent. The Peck Shah­namah is one of the most extra­or­di­nary Safavid illu­mi­nated man­u­scripts of Firdawsī’s epic and has been com­pared to better-known exam­ples such as the Houghton Shah­namah and Wind­sor Cas­tle Shah­namah. The Per­sian poet Hakīm Abu’l-Qāsim Fir­dawsī Tūsī com­monly known as Fir­dawsī (933/4–1025 CE) com­pleted the epic in 1009/10. The text begins with the first leg­endary Per­sian king and ends with the fall of the Sas­san­ian empire to the Arabs in the mid­dle of the 7th cen­tury. Prof. Charles Melville, Pem­broke Col­lege, Cam­bridge, who has stud­ied the pro­lif­er­a­tion of illu­mi­nated Shah­namah man­u­scripts since the end of the 13th cen­tury, sees in Firdawsī’s work not just a mas­ter­piece of Per­sian epic poetry, but a text that “has come to encap­su­late Iran’s pride in her past and to serve as a source for under­stand­ing her polit­i­cal culture.”

The scribe Qiwām ibn Muḥammad of Shīrāz pre­pared the man­u­script. The date 998 H, which he pro­vides, cor­re­sponds to 1589/90 CE. On styl­is­tic grounds, the paint­ings are also local­iz­able to Shīrāz, an impor­tant cen­ter of man­u­script pro­duc­tion in south­west­ern Iran. The Peck Shah­namah has 475 paper folios and a full paint­ing cycle of 45 full-page minia­tures spread through­out the text, as well as double-page minia­tures at the begin­ning, mid­dle, and end of the man­u­script. The minia­tures are of high qual­ity and sub­stan­tial size, mea­sur­ing 47.0 × 32.5 cm. The man­u­script has had a dis­tin­guished prove­nance. From an inscrip­tion in the man­u­script, we know that Khayrāt Khan, an envoy from ‘Abd Allāh Quṭbshāh to Iṣfahān, acquired it from a woman who was the daugh­ter of the Safavid provin­cial ruler Khān Aḥmad Khān of Gīlān and widow of Emperor Shāh Abbās I of Per­sia (1571–1629), in Rajab (1040 H/1631 CE). By the 18th cen­tury, the man­u­script was in Eng­land, where around 1780 it was elab­o­rately rebound by a Lon­don book­binder in a western-style red morocco bind­ing. Later the man­u­script was later in the col­lec­tion of Sir George Hol­ford (1860–1926). The Amer­i­can anti­quar­ian book­seller and col­lec­tor A.S.W. Rosen­bach (1876–1952) sold the man­u­script in 1946 to Clara S. Peck, an Amer­i­can col­lec­tor and horse breeder, who lived at Whigancek Farm in Shrews­bury, Mon­mouth County, New Jer­sey. The man­u­script was Peck’s 1983 bequest to the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library, in mem­ory of her brother Fre­mont C. Peck, Class of 1920.

The minia­tures in the Peck Shah­namah were ini­tially dig­i­tized so that they could be added to the Shah­nama Project web­site, which was cre­ated by Jerome W. Clin­ton (1937–2003), a pro­fes­sor of Per­sian in the Depart­ment of Near East­ern Stud­ies at Prince­ton. In coop­er­a­tion with the Library, dig­i­tal images and descrip­tions of 277 minia­tures from five Prince­ton man­u­scripts were added to the web­site. In addi­tion to Peck, the Shah­nama Project includes minia­tures in four Shah­namah man­u­scripts (1544–1674) that were the 1942 gift of Robert Gar­rett (1875–1961), Class of 1897. With grant sup­port from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Pro­fes­sor Clin­ton and the art his­to­rian Mar­i­anna Shreve Simp­son began a col­lab­o­ra­tive study on the inter­re­la­tion­ship of text and image in man­u­scripts of the Shah­namah. Their research paid spe­cial atten­tion to the Peck Shah­namah. Clin­ton and Simp­son pro­vided some of the Getty grant funds to the Library in 2002 in order to dig­i­tize the entire man­u­script, includ­ing all text folios and minia­tures. Ini­tially, the dig­i­tal images were used for the research project, which was com­pleted by Simp­son after Clinton’s untimely death. How­ever, once the Prince­ton Dig­i­tal Library of Islamic Man­u­scripts was cre­ated, with the gen­er­ous sup­port of the David A. Gard­ner ’69 Magic Project, it became the per­fect vehi­cle for dis­sem­i­nat­ing the fully dig­i­tized man­u­script. Recently uploaded, the Peck Shah­namah joins more than 200 other dig­i­tized Islamic man­u­scripts from the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion. View the Peck Shah­namah here.

For fur­ther read­ing on the Peck Shah­namah, see the fol­low­ing: (1) Louise Mar­low, “A Per­sian Book of Kings: The Peck Shah­nameh,” Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Chron­i­cle 46 (1985), pp. 192–214; (2) Louise Mar­low, “The Peck Shah­nameh: Man­u­script Pro­duc­tion in Late Sixteenth-Century Shi­raz,” in Michel M. Maz­za­oui and Vera B. Moreen, eds., Intel­lec­tual Stud­ies on Islam: Essays Writ­ten in Honor of Mar­tin B. Dick­son (Salt Lake City, 1900), pp. 229–243; and (3) Jerome W. Clin­ton and Mar­i­anna S. Simp­son, “How Rus­tam Killed White Div: An Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Inquiry,” Iran­ian Stud­ies 26:2 (2006), pp. 171–197.

“Royal Hunt,” Peck Shanamah, folio 473. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Man­u­scripts Divi­sion is pleased to announce that it has received the remain­der of the papers of Amer­i­can author Con­rad Richter (1890–1968) as a bequest from the estate of his daugh­ter, Prof. Har­vena Richter, of Albu­querque, New Mex­ico. The Con­rad Richter Papers [46 lin­ear feet] have now been fully arranged and described in a find­ing aid.

The title of Con­rad Richter’s book A Sim­ple Hon­or­able Man (1962) may well have been fash­ioned after the author’s own self image. Richter, an Amer­i­can nov­el­ist active dur­ing the mid­dle decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, wrote books about hon­est, earthy peo­ple: pio­neers, set­tlers, cow­boys, and Amer­i­can Indi­ans were among his favorite sub­jects. The author was born in Pine Grove, PA, in 1890, the eldest son of a Penn­syl­va­nia Ger­man fam­ily, the son and grand­son of Lutheran min­is­ters. He did not go to col­lege, nor did he wish to join the min­istry. Plagued with what he referred to as “bad nerves,” the young Richter tried his hand at a num­ber of occu­pa­tions. Among them was writ­ing, which he did assid­u­ously, intent on pro­vid­ing for his wife and daugh­ter.  By 1951 Richter had won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Town (1951), the third install­ment in his tril­ogy The Awak­en­ing Land. There were film adap­ta­tions of his nov­els, such as The Sea of Grass (1937), star­ring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hep­burn, directed by Elia Kazan.

A 1950 let­ter from Julian P. Boyd, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Librar­ian, to Alfred Knopf, Richter’s pub­lisher, points to the begin­ning of Princeton’s first inter­est in Richter’s papers. Though Richter offered two man­u­scripts to Prince­ton as a gift, Boyd writes in his let­ter to Knopf, “I intend to have [Richter’s] man­u­scripts hand­somely done up in slip cases – some­thing like the way in which Dreiser’s Sis­ter Car­rie is cared for by the New York Pub­lic Library” [“Let­ter to Alfred Knopf,” May 23, 1950, Con­rad Richter Papers, Box 38, Folder 5, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library]. Over the next few months Boyd and Richter cor­re­sponded, con­vers­ing ami­ably about Fire­stone Library, which had opened in 1949. In an acknowl­edge­ment let­ter (July 10, 1950), Boyd thanks Richter for his gift to the library.

Over the next 60 years, Prince­ton con­tin­ued to receive gifts from the Richter fam­ily of the author’s papers and man­u­scripts, which included size­able cor­re­spon­dence files, pho­tographs, and man­u­scripts. Among the most valu­able research mate­ri­als in Richter’s papers are the author’s jour­nals and note­books, begin­ning in the 1920s and kept through­out his life; and cor­re­spon­dence with his pub­lisher, Alfred and Blanche Knopf; and with his lit­er­ary agent, Paul Reynolds. In var­i­ous places the Richter Papers reveal a slightly more nuanced indi­vid­ual than “a sim­ple, hon­or­able man” might indi­cate; cor­re­spon­dence with psy­chol­o­gists, psy­chics, and sleep spe­cial­ists indi­cate Richter’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, or at the very least inter­est, with the meta­phys­i­cal, and a per­sonal let­ter from J. Edgar Hoover also gives pause.  Now avail­able, the col­lec­tion gives researchers the oppor­tu­nity to redis­cover and learn more about this thor­oughly Amer­i­can novelist.

Con­rad Richter as a cow­boy, circa 1940. Box 99, Folder 4. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Con­rad Richter: A Sim­ple Hon­or­able Man, circa 1962. Box 99, Folder 5. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

“My dis­may at the clut­ter on my desk is off­set by my zest for the hunt among my papers.  At an age when I should be putting my house in order, I keep accu­mu­lat­ing bits of infor­ma­tion, not for any par­tic­u­lar rea­son and in spite of the absur­dity, because I was born curi­ous and don’t know how to stop.”

Stan­ley Kunitz, “Seed­corn and Wind­fall” from Next to Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)

Born curi­ous, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stan­ley Kunitz [1905–2005] lived a long and var­ied life.  Beyond the crit­i­cal acclaim he gained for his poetry, Kunitz and his wife, the painter and poet Elise Asher, were friends to many of the 20^th century’s cul­tural giants: painters like Mark Rothko, Philip Gus­ton, and Robert Moth­er­well; and poets like Robert “Cal” Low­ell, Mar­i­anne Moore and Eliz­a­beth Bishop.  The cou­ple split their time between their Green­wich Vil­lage apart­ment and Province­town, MA, where Kunitz raised a sea­side gar­den, and they trav­eled extensively.

A rest­less spirit, Kunitz helped found the Fine Arts Work Cen­ter, an artist-residency pro­gram in Province­town, and Poets House in New York City, two orga­ni­za­tions that would help sup­port gen­er­a­tions of younger poets.   By the time Prince­ton University’s Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions acquired Mr. Kunitz’s papers, the aging poet had indeed amassed a cer­tain amount, as he wrote, of clut­ter.  Clut­ter – per­haps – but it was good clut­ter, con­sti­tut­ing a trove of research mate­r­ial for lit­er­ary schol­ars and art his­to­ri­ans alike.  Avail­able for research, the Stan­ley Kunitz Papers offers a com­plete find­ing aid, doc­u­ment­ing the life and work of one of the United States’ most promi­nent poets.

In Stan­ley Kunitz’s own words, “it was not an aus­pi­cious begin­ning.” [“My Mother’s Story,” TMs, Box 147 Folder 11]   Bereft of a father and the only son of an East­ern Euro­pean immi­grant mother, Stan­ley Kunitz grew up in Worces­ter, MA, where he spent a good deal of time out of doors.  At an early age Kunitz became enthralled with the nat­ural world, a theme that is recur­rent in his poems, such as this one, “The Test­ing Tree”:

Once I owned the key
To an umbra­geous trail
Thick­ened with mosses
Where flick­er­ing pres­ences
Gave me right of passage […]

His fas­ci­na­tion with comets, insects, whales, birds, rac­coons, and the ways of plants and flow­ers informs his most endur­ing poems.  While Kunitz did explore polit­i­cal and social themes through­out his work, the notes, sub­ject files and clip­pings in the Stan­ley Kunitz Papers con­firm his abid­ing pas­sion for the nat­ural world.  Equally at home in the flower bed and at the type­writer, his last book, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Cen­tury in the Gar­den (2005) exam­ines the syn­the­sis of these two voca­tions.  Man­u­scripts of this book and oth­ers demon­strate Kunitz’s delib­er­ate and sus­tained writ­ing prac­tice, no doubt informed by the patience, per­sis­tence, and an eye to detail refined by a life­time work­ing the garden.

Beyond the man­u­scripts, the Papers give access to reams of cor­re­spon­dence between Kunitz and the literati and glit­terati of the 20th cen­tury; fan let­ters span­ning five decades; the peace-loving poet’s mil­i­tary dis­charge papers and his father’s death cer­tifi­cate; draw­ings sent to him from his poet friends; poems writ­ten by his artist friends.  Many items invite inves­ti­ga­tion, such as the Russ­ian trans­la­tions, some of which remain unpub­lished; Elise Asher’s recipe for Cream of Sor­rel Soup;the uniden­ti­fied cor­re­spon­dence; and frag­ments of pos­si­bly unpub­lished poems.

Among the most tan­ta­liz­ing mate­ri­als are the pho­tographs [Box 183].  Whether pic­tured with fel­low poets, Jorge Luis Borges at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, or deep in con­ver­sa­tion with Mark Rothko, the pho­tographs tes­tify to Kunitz’s active engage­ment in the world of arts and let­ters.  As a poet among painters, Kunitz gained entrée into some of the most leg­endary cul­tural scenes of the 20^th cen­tury, like “The Club,” which Kunitz char­ac­ter­ized as “the stormy social and debat­ing soci­ety of the New York School” [“Gior­gio Cav­al­lon 1904–1989,” Box 146, Folder 10].  The com­bi­na­tion of Kunitz’s own intel­lec­tual achieve­ment and his per­sonal friend­ships makes the Stan­ley Kunitz Papers a valu­able resource for researchers across the human­is­tic disciplines.

Mark Rothko and Stan­ley Kunitz, undated. Box 183, Folder 17. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Front row (L to R): John Berry­man, Adri­enne Rich, Josephine Jacob­sen and James Mer­rill; Back row (L to R): Kunitz, Richard Eber­hart, Robert Low­ell, Richard Wilbur, William Mered­ith (Class of 1940) and Robert Penn War­ren. Box 183, Folder 7. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

George Cruik­shank (1792–1878) was one of the most inven­tive and tal­ented graphic satirists of his time. As a boy in Lon­don, he learned print­mak­ing from his father, Isaac Cruik­shank; after Isaac died in 1811, the fam­ily was sup­ported entirely by George’s draw­ings. His polit­i­cal and social car­i­ca­tures enter­tained and piqued the British pub­lic, and when he died, he was one of England’s best known and most pro­lific artists, hav­ing designed as many as twelve thou­sand prints.

The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s George Cruik­shank Col­lec­tion con­sists of 35 boxes of Cruikshank’s per­sonal papers, cor­re­spon­dence, and orig­i­nal draw­ings, includ­ing some two dozen bound sketch books. The most recent addi­tion to the col­lec­tion is a man­u­script in Cruikshank’s hand, heav­ily cor­rected and signed by him in six places. The man­u­script is a draft of a pam­phlet Cruik­shank would pub­lish in 1860 titled A Pop-gun Fired Off by George Cruik­shank: In Defence of the British Vol­un­teers of 1803, express­ing sup­port for civil­ian vol­un­teers in the face of a French inva­sion of Great Britain. The man­u­script includes nine­teen col­ored and pen-and-ink sketches, which dif­fer from those pub­lished in A Pop-gun.

In A Pop-gun, Cruik­shank recalls his first par­tic­i­pa­tion in a vol­un­teer mili­tia at age 11. When Napoleon Bona­parte (1769–1821) declared war on Britain in 1803, George Cruikshank’s father Isaac joined a vol­un­teer troop while George and his brother drilled with toy weapons. The man­u­script draft offers fur­ther details: “In our Blooms­bury corp,” he writes, “we had to find our own uni­forms with the help of the mamas—and our own arms and accoutrements—my Brother made him­self a paste­board cocked hat and a youth who was appren­ticed to a coach builder made him a saber of wood…and I had a paste­board cap and the Reg­i­ment hav­ing punched some small gun stocks, we had moss sticks—or Broom handles—fixed in these, and Black leaded to imi­tate the pol­ished steel.” His train­ing as a boy, he argued in A Pop-gun, pre­pared him well to bear arms as an adult in defense of his coun­try. At the bot­tom of this man­u­script page, Cruik­shank has included a col­ored sketch of sol­diers in uniform.

The man­u­script is accom­pa­nied by a scrap of paper in Cruikshank’s hand con­tain­ing mil­i­tary maneu­vers and dia­grams, tipped into a book­let titled Our Rifle Vol­un­teers, Sketched by “Quiz.” The book­let is an illus­trated verse satire on the vol­un­teer mili­tia that also focuses on the vol­un­teers’ attire, but to very dif­fer­ent effect. On one page, the verse “Now don’t make a fool of your­self, strut­ting there,/With the limbs of an ape, and the head of a bear” is illus­trated with a draw­ing of an artillery vol­un­teer wear­ing a large, furry hat and a com­i­cal expres­sion. If the author of this work was not Cruik­shank, it may have been Edward Caswall (1814–1878), a Roman Catholic priest who also wrote humor­ous and satir­i­cal poetry under the pseu­do­nym Scriblerus Redi­vivus. Cruik­shank may have owned this book­let and used it for reference.

In 1859, British vol­un­teer troops were formed again under the threat of another French inva­sion. Cruik­shank joined the 48^th Mid­dle­sex corps, even­tu­ally becom­ing its com­mand­ing offi­cer; the George Cruik­shank Col­lec­tion con­tains other mate­ri­als related to his career in the Mid­dle­sex corps. The col­lec­tion com­ple­ments the Graphic Arts Divi­sion’s hold­ings of over six hun­dred Cruik­shank prints.

Addi­tion­ally, scat­tered through­out the Man­u­scripts Department’s hold­ings is a wealth of works of art on paper by many British artists and illus­tra­tors, most of whom have a lit­er­ary asso­ci­a­tion: for exam­ple, George Du Mau­rier, Thomas Row­land­son, and J.M. Bar­rie. Wor­thy of spe­cial men­tion is the renowned Gallatin-Beardsley Col­lec­tion, which includes 130 draw­ings by Aubrey Beard­s­ley, col­lected by the Amer­i­can artist A.E. Gal­latin, along with a rich archive of man­u­scripts, cor­re­spon­dence, posters, illus­trated books, and other mate­ri­als by or related to the 1890s Eng­lish artist. The Depart­ment also holds art­work by other mem­bers of the Pre-Raphaelite cir­cle: Dante Gabriel Ros­setti, John Ruskin, John Everett Mil­lais, Simeon Solomon, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beer­bohm, and Gwen John, whose water­col­ors were recently dis­cov­ered in the Arthur Symons Papers.

George Cruik­shank, undated man­u­script draft of A Pop-gun. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Our Rifle Vol­un­teers, sketched by “Quiz.” Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library is pleased to announce that the Dou­glas Kent Hall Papers, a gen­er­ous gift from Dawn Hall in 2010, have been arranged and described in a detailed find­ing aid and are now open and avail­able to researchers. The papers com­prise more than 100 boxes of cor­re­spon­dence, man­u­scripts, notes, research files, and audio and visual mate­ri­als, doc­u­ment­ing approx­i­mately fifty years of Dou­glas Kent Hall’s work as a writer and photographer.

Dou­glas Kent Hall (1938–2008) was born in Ver­nal, Utah, a rural com­mu­nity approx­i­mately two hun­dred miles from Salt Lake City. He attended the Iowa Writer’s Work­shop, cou­pling his inter­ests in cre­ative writ­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy for a life­time of doc­u­men­tary and artis­tic pho­tog­ra­phy across the world. Hall trav­eled through Europe in 1968 and set­tled in New York City in 1971, where he had his first pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion at the Whit­ney Museum of Amer­i­can Art in 1974. In 1977, he moved to New Mex­ico. The Amer­i­can south­west and bor­der region would influ­ence the next thirty years of his work, result­ing in at least ten major pub­li­ca­tions and projects from the 1980s through the 2000s.

The cre­ative bulk of the papers con­sists of at least 96,000 unique pho­to­graphic images in the form of black-and-white neg­a­tives, con­tact sheets, color trans­paren­cies, and prints span­ning Hall’s forty years of work as a pho­tog­ra­pher. Major sub­jects include rock and roll stars from the 1960s and early 1970s (includ­ing Jimi Hen­drix and The Who), the Amer­i­can south­west (includ­ing rodeos, mis­sion churches, bor­der res­i­dents, and Native dances), poets and artists (includ­ing Mark Strand, Allen Gins­berg, and W. S. Mer­win), and pho­to­graphic stud­ies of sub­cul­tures includ­ing body­build­ing (with Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger and Lou Fer­rigno), prison life, drag rac­ing, dance, and cow­boy lifestyles. Loca­tions pho­tographed include the U.S.-Mexico bor­der, the Amer­i­can West, New Mex­ico, New York City, Japan, Aus­tralia, Brazil, Mex­ico, and Rus­sia. The pho­tographs are accom­pa­nied by man­u­scripts, notes, research files, and cor­re­spon­dence related to their production.

Hall also wrote an Acad­emy Award-winning doc­u­men­tary about rodeo (his long­time inter­est), and pub­lished four nov­els and over fif­teen pho­tog­ra­phy books on sub­jects rang­ing from body build­ing (with Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger) to the Native Amer­i­can weav­ing tra­di­tions of New Mex­ico. His nov­els were often auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, cen­ter­ing around his rural Mormon-influenced child­hood, while his pho­tog­ra­phy books explored sub­cul­tures he dis­cov­ered as an adult, such as rock and roll, body­build­ing, and prison life. The papers include drafts of major pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing his first novel On the Way to the Sky (1972) and Let ‘Er Buck (1973), as well as the inter­views and research behind the doc­u­men­tary The Great Amer­i­can Cow­boy and exten­sive unpub­lished drafts and related mate­ri­als. Other writ­ings include books, plays, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal short sto­ries, essays, free­lance arti­cles and reviews, unpub­lished poetry, tele­plays, and unpro­duced screen­plays from his time as a stu­dent up until his death.

The Dou­glas Kent Hall Papers are a val­ued addi­tion to Princeton’s exten­sive hold­ings of West­ern Amer­i­cana, includ­ing man­u­scripts, archives, his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs, printed books, maps, and other mate­ri­als. These include Daniel Gano’s Gold Rush Scrap­book and other over­land travel nar­ra­tives, the West­ern Amer­i­cana Pho­to­graph Col­lec­tion, pho­tographs of Native Amer­i­can Indi­ans from the Geo­log­i­cal and Geo­graph­i­cal Sur­vey of the Ter­ri­to­ries by William Henry Jack­son (1843–1942) and oth­ers, and the Shel­don Jack­son Col­lec­tion of Indian Pho­tographs.

The See­ley G. Mudd Library, part of the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, has 11 boxes of pho­tographs in the Asso­ci­a­tion on Amer­i­can Indian Affairs Records and a series of pri­vate papers con­cern­ing the cru­sade to return Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. For printed books, includ­ing those in the Philip Ash­ton Rollins Col­lec­tion and J. Mon­roe Thor­ing­ton Col­lec­tion, please con­tact the Rare Books Divi­sion. For maps, please con­tact John Delaney, Cura­tor of His­toric Maps, at delaney@princeton.edu.

Dou­glas Kent Hall, Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger and Jamie Wyeth, undated. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Dou­glas Kent Hall, Black Mesa, undated. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library has recently acquired 19 boxes of man­u­scripts, cor­re­spon­dence, audio­vi­sual mate­ri­als, and ephemera of Sir Frank Ker­mode (1919–2010), one of the most dis­tin­guished lit­er­ary crit­ics of the 20th cen­tury. These mate­ri­als con­sti­tute Kermode’s remain­ing papers and have been added to the Sir Frank Ker­mode Papers, which the Library began acquir­ing in 2007 with sup­port from the Friends of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. For a sum­mary of and high­lights from the orig­i­nal acqui­si­tion in 2007, click here.

Ker­mode is well known for his sem­i­nal book of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, Sense of an End­ing: Stud­ies in the The­ory of Fic­tion (1967), as well as his writ­ings on William Shake­speare and D. H. Lawrence. Exten­sive drafts of these works, with auto­graph cor­rec­tions, are rep­re­sented in this lat­est addi­tion, which includes early drafts of Sense of an End­ing, a typed man­u­script draft of D. H. Lawrence (1973), and cor­re­spon­dence, hand­writ­ten notes, sheet music, and gal­ley proofs for his Arden Shake­speare edi­tion of The Tem­pest (1954). The addi­tion also con­tains a bound car­bon type­script of Aaron Hill and his Plays (1940), which Ker­mode called his first book, as well as sev­eral boxes of unpub­lished lec­tures and research notes and over two dozen unpub­lished notebooks.

The acqui­si­tion enhances the Library’s hold­ings of lit­er­ary crit­ics’ papers and pub­lish­ers’ archives. Sev­eral dozen let­ters from Ker­mode appear in the papers of poet and lit­er­ary critic Allen Tate (1899–1979), who also cor­re­sponded at length with Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994), Mal­colm Cow­ley (1898–1989), and Robert Penn War­ren (1905–1989). The Library has the papers of (and copy­right to) R. P. Black­mur (1904–1965), another promi­nent lit­er­ary critic who was a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing at Prince­ton from 1940 to 1965. His papers include drafts of his cre­ative work and crit­i­cal essays, lec­ture notes, cor­re­spon­dence with other Amer­i­can lit­er­ary fig­ures, note­books, and photographs.

The archives of The Hud­son Review, a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine that has pub­lished some the most emi­nent writ­ers and crit­ics of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, con­tains cor­re­spon­dence with Erich Auer­bach (1892–1957), Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye (1912–1991), Fred­eric Jame­son, Mar­shall McLuhan (1911–1980), Edward Said (1935–2003), and oth­ers, while the archives of the lit­er­ary mag­a­zine Quar­terly Review of Lit­er­a­ture includes cor­re­spon­dence with crit­ics such as Ken­neth Burke (1897–1993), Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), and W. K. Wim­satt (1907–1975), as well as an unpub­lished essay by Paul de Man (1919–1983) on the Roman­tic poet Friedrich Hölder­lin (1770–1843).

The Library also holds papers of 19th– and 20th-century British lit­er­ary and art crit­ics, includ­ing Ray­mond Mor­timer (1895–1980), William Michael Ros­setti (1829–1919), John Ruskin (1819–1900), and Arthur Symons (1865–1945).

Sir Frank Ker­mode, undated pho­to­graph (detail). Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Wal­ter Houk Col­lec­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way is now open and avail­able to researchers.

The Man­u­scripts Divi­sion recently received a gift of five boxes of man­u­scripts, cor­re­spon­dence, stenographer’s note­books, pho­tographs, and nau­ti­cal charts from Wal­ter Houk. The papers doc­u­ment the friend­ship between Wal­ter and his wife Juanita Jensen Houk and the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hem­ing­way (1899–1961) in Havana, Cuba, where Hem­ing­way was writ­ing his last major works, Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

Juanita Jensen Houk, an employee of the Amer­i­can Embassy in Havana, received gov­ern­ment clear­ance to work as Ernest Hemingway’s sec­re­tary from 1949 to 1952. In 1952, she mar­ried Wal­ter Houk, a diplo­matic offi­cer at the Embassy. Their wed­ding recep­tion was held at Finca Vigía, the Hem­ing­ways’ house near Havana. The cou­ple were fre­quent vis­i­tors at the finca, where they used the library, swam in the pool, went fish­ing on Hemingway’s boat Pilar, and drank daiquiris with him at the Floridita bar.

The col­lec­tion offers a mul­ti­fac­eted view of the author dur­ing a par­tic­u­larly pro­lific and cre­ative period. Juanita Jensen Houk’s stenographer’s note­books, with typed tran­scrip­tions, of over a hun­dred of Hemingway’s dic­tated let­ters include let­ters not only to his friends and fam­ily but also to pub­lish­ers and agents. He reported on his book’s progress to Charles Scrib­ner and wrote to A. E. Hotch­ner about seri­al­iz­ing Across the River and into the Trees in the mag­a­zine Cos­mopoli­tan. In let­ters to Mal­colm Cow­ley, he dis­cussed fel­low authors such as Saul Bel­low, Tru­man Capote, Gertrude Stein, and Eudora Welty. In addi­tion, the col­lec­tion con­tains the Houks’ own cor­re­spon­dence with the Hem­ing­ways, includ­ing nine let­ters by Ernest Hem­ing­way and four­teen by his wife Mary, pho­tographs of the Hem­ing­ways and Houks on the Pilar, and Wal­ter Houk’s man­u­script mem­oirs about Hem­ing­way and Havana.

Wal­ter Houk’s rem­i­nis­cences of his friend­ship with Hem­ing­way dur­ing the Havana years form key parts of Paul Hendrickson’s new biog­ra­phy, Hemingway’s Boat: Every­thing He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 (Knopf, 2011). The book reassesses Hemingway’s cre­ative life and per­sonal rela­tion­ships through his attach­ment to his cher­ished boat Pilar. Accord­ing to Hen­drick­son, “The archive where I have spent the most time in these last seven or so years of research and writ­ing is Fire­stone Library at Prince­ton. The uni­ver­sity is an hour and ten min­utes from my front door; the car knows the way.” He calls the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, which con­tains some 2,000 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence between Hem­ing­way and his edi­tors, and the Car­los Baker Col­lec­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way “my cen­tripetal research force. Nearly all the let­ters I quote from or make ref­er­ence to in this book I have sat and held and read in the chapel-like Dulles Read­ing Room at Firestone.”

The Wal­ter Houk Col­lec­tion is a robust addi­tion to the Library’s Hem­ing­way mate­ri­als. Other related col­lec­tions include the Ernest Hem­ing­way Col­lec­tion, Hemingway/Lanham Cor­re­spon­dence, Patrick Hem­ing­way Papers, Far­rar & Rine­hart, Inc., Files of Hem­ing­way and Pound, Ernest Hem­ing­way Doc­u­ments and Tax-related Papers, and Ernest Hem­ing­way and Mil­ford J. Baker Cor­re­spon­dence.

Wal­ter Houk, Ernest Hem­ing­way on the fly­ing bridge of the Pilar, 1951. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

One of the high­lights of the sum­mer of 2011 was a visit to the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions on June 28 by Aus­tralian movie direc­tor Baz Luhrmann and mem­bers of his pro­duc­tion team. Their visit to Prince­ton was in con­nec­tion with pro­duc­tion of a new movie ver­sion of The Great Gatsby. Don Ske­mer, cura­tor of man­u­scripts, showed Luhrmann and the oth­ers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heav­ily cor­rected gal­leys of Tri­mal­chio, an early ver­sion of The Great Gatsby. In the pho­to­graph below, Luhrmann is in the fore­ground. The gal­leys are part of the F. Scott Fitzger­ald Papers, which the author’s daugh­ter Scot­tie Fitzger­ald Lana­han donated to the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library in 1950. Ske­mer explained how Fitzgerald’s cre­ative process can be traced in his own papers and related mate­ri­als pre­served in the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion. Par­tic­u­larly reveal­ing is the author’s exten­sive cor­re­spon­dence with the leg­endary lit­er­ary edi­tor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald’s pub­lisher. After the visit, Luhrmann wrote to Ske­mer to say, “Hav­ing returned from our trip to Prince­ton, I just wanted to reach out and thank you once again. See­ing those mate­ri­als and hear­ing you artic­u­late Fitzgerald’s processes really gave us a sec­ond burst of energy.” The British actress Carey Mul­li­gan, who will play Daisy Buchanan in the movie, also vis­ited to view por­tions of the Fitzger­ald Papers and in par­tic­u­lar to dis­cuss the author’s rela­tion­ship with Ginevra King, who served as a model for Daisy, Jay Gatsby’s lost love. Ginevra King’s let­ters to Fitzger­ald and diary are also pre­served in the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion. Mul­li­gan, who earned an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for best actress in 2010, told the Huff­in­g­ton Post: “I went to Prince­ton where they keep all [Fitzgerald’s] papers and I got to look at Zelda Fitzgerald’s med­ical records and … the most amaz­ing stuff.” Film­ing has begun in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, with Leonardo DiCaprio play­ing Jay Gatsby and Tobey Maguire as Nick Car­away. Luhrmann’s new movie of The Great Gatsby is sched­uled for a New York pre­miere in Decem­ber 2012.

Baz Luhrmann, right, exam­ines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s papers. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.