While studying art history in graduate school, novelist Nicole Krauss spent hours in the library researching Rembrandt, only to find that she preferred imagining the details of his life instead. “Beyond looking at his paintings, no amount of research would ever take me there. But a novel might,” Krauss said.… read more
In good company: Author busts keep watch over scholars in the Reading Room
It’s hard enough to do archival research without the subjects themselves peering over your shoulder. But if you visit the Ransom Center Reading Room to pore over the letters, manuscripts, and papers of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Robert De Niro, or Edgar Allan Poe, they are all there… read more
Gown of a different feather: Conservators investigate feathers on the burgundy gown from "Gone With The Wind"
The burgundy ball gown Scarlett wears to Ashley’s birthday party in Gone With The Wind is meant to be provocative (“not modest or matronly,” Rhett snarls) yet glamorous. But when the gown arrived at the Ransom Center in the early 1980s, something wasn’t quite right. “It looked more like a… read more