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Authors

What is research but a conversation in search of the truth?

April 15, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

Babb book cover

by IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 
[Read more…] about What is research but a conversation in search of the truth?

Filed Under: archive, Authors, Featured1, literature, Research + Teaching Tagged With: Research, What is Research?

ABOUT IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes and lives in Northern California and is the author of Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her latest collection of poetry is West : Fire : Archive (Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

NOT SPEED READING: The slow pleasures of research

March 25, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by JULIA PANKO
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.  [Read more…] about NOT SPEED READING: The slow pleasures of research

Filed Under: archive, Authors, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archival research, Virginia Woolf, What is Research?

ABOUT JULIA PANKO

Julia Panko is an Associate Professor of English at Weber State University, where she directs the Literature and Textual Studies program. She is the author of Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).

Researching microbiography in Tennessee Williams’s artwork

March 4, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by JOHN S. BAK
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.  [Read more…] about Researching microbiography in Tennessee Williams’s artwork

Filed Under: archive, Authors, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: fellows, What is Research?

ABOUT JOHN S. BAK

John S. Bak, Professeur at the Université de Lorraine in France, holds degrees from the universities of Illinois, Ball State and the Sorbonne. A Fulbrighter to the Czech Republic in 1995, he has been Visiting Fellow at Harvard (2011), Columbia (2013), the Harry Ransom Center (2014), and Oxford (2014-16). His books include Tennessee Williams and Europe (2014), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Knopf archive reveals details about Lonely Crusade author Chester Himes

February 26, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

Many writers and artists through history have developed their craft, and even published, while they were imprisoned. Among them is Chester Himes, an African American author who wrote about racism, prison life, and who is best known for his Harlem Detective series.

Records related to Himes are found in the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. archive, which documents the history of the well-known publishing house. The papers contain correspondence, publicity materials, and/or manuscripts from a number of other African American writers, including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, John Oliver Killens, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and Walter White.

Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1909. Of his adolescence, Himes wrote that he was “lonely, shy, and insufferably belligerent.” 1 Himes was incarcerated at Ohio State Penitentiary at the age of 19, and two years into his 20-plus-year sentence for armed robbery, his first short story was published in an African American–owned magazine, The Bronzeman, in 1931. He also sold articles to Esquire, such as “Crazy in the Stir,” which appeared with the chilling byline “59623,” his prison number.

Knopf’s Manuscript Record for Chester Himes’s novel Lonely Crusade, 1946–1947. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 1363.3. Harry Ransom Center.

After his release from prison during the Depression, he held dozens of jobs while focusing on writing novels, screenplays, and making connections with other writers. Himes favored protagonists who were less than heroic or likable, and the enthusiasm for his fiction by other African American writers was often tepid. However, Langston Hughes supported him by introducing his work to his own publisher, Blanche Wolf Knopf.

Knopf asked Hughes to provide a blurb for Himes’s second novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), a novel exploring racism and labor strife during World War II, but Hughes demurred. His reason? “Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds; they behave so badly, which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them.” 2

The dust jacket for Chester Himes’s novel Lonely Crusade, 1947. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 1221.5. Harry Ransom Center.

In the summer of 1950, Himes taught a popular creative writing seminar at the North Carolina State Negro College in Durham, where for two weeks he was a celebrity figure. Below is Himes’s letter of gratitude written to Knopf music editor Herbert Weinstock for his publication advice to “new novelists.” 3

Chester Himes’s letter to Herbert Weinstock, July 18, 1950. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 68.7. Harry Ransom Center.

Editorial Vice President Seymour Lawrence received this letter in 1964 from Himes, who by this time had expatriated to Paris. Himes writes that he felt it was time for him to publish his memoirs and in this letter, requests an advance on royalties of $400 per month for two years. The Quality of Hurt, volume one of his autobiography, was published by Doubleday in 1971.

Chester Himes’s letter to Seymour Lawrence, November 4, 1964. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 411.4. Harry Ransom Center.

Between 1957 and 1969, Chester Himes eventually found popularity in France for his Harlem Detective novel series featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.

Ishmael Reed wrote that Chester Himes was “[A] great writer and a brave man. His life has shown that black writers are as heroic as the athletes, entertainers, scientists, cowboys, pimps, gangsters, and politicians they might write about.” 4


[1] Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt, (Paragon House, 1990), 14.
[2] Arnold Rampersand, The Life of Langston Hughes, (Oxford University Press, 1986 and 1988), 134.
[3] James Sallis, Chester Himes: A Life, (Walker & Co, 2000), 32.
[4] Stephen F. Milliken, Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal, (University of Missouri Press, 1976), 220.

Filed Under: Authors, Books + Manuscripts, Featured1 Tagged With: African American Creators, African American History Month, African American literature

ABOUT MELANIE ALBERTS
Melanie Alberts works in the Office of the Director at the Harry Ransom Center. She serves on the Diversity and Inclusion committee, is a psychic artist, and writes lyric poems which have appeared in journals such as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.

A lost work by Langston Hughes

February 1, 2021 - Steven Hoelscher

Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race, unpublished in English until 2019. [Read more…] about A lost work by Langston Hughes

Filed Under: archive, Authors, Featured1, literature Tagged With: African American Creators, African American History Month, Black History Month, Langston Hughes

Highlights from an unprecedented year

December 31, 2020 - Harry Ransom Center

It was not the year we anticipated, hoped for, or a year we would want to repeat. The first rumblings of the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, escalated in February, and eventually erupted in our community in March when the Center closed its doors to in-person visits and staff began working remotely. What happened next was a natural shift to expanding the Center’s online presence throughout the year. [Read more…] about Highlights from an unprecedented year

Filed Under: archive, Art, Authors, Books + Manuscripts, Cataloging, Conservation, Digital Collections, Exhibitions + Events, Featured1, literature, Photography, Research + Teaching, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: Year-in-Review

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