The Ransom Center’s extensive David Foster Wallace collection was recently enriched by a donation of the original manuscript of a little-known, unpublished story, titled “Shorn.” Wallace wrote the two-page story, about a boy having his hair cut by his mother, while a graduate student at the University of Arizona. The… read more
Books + Manuscripts
A graduation diploma: “The Eviction Notice Written in Latin”
![Spalding Gray’s “The Graduation Speech I Never Made” reads like a warm-up exercise created by an anxious speechwriter. Its concluding sentences, which include strikeouts and misspelled words, read: “I’m sorry to say I have no advice to give. How could I deign [sic] to give advice when my life is held together like an ill-made birds nest, and I am still surprised as well as shocked by each new dawn?”](https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/files/2014/05/GrayS_15_9_001-768x982.jpg)
This week, The University of Texas at Austin prepares its podiums and fireworks for Saturday’s commencement ceremony, the 131st in the school’s history.
Acclaimed writer Ian McEwan’s archive acquired
The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the archive of writer Ian McEwan (b. 1948), one of the most distinguished novelists of his generation. The archive documents McEwan’s career and includes early material from his childhood and adolescence, as well as his earliest abandoned stories dating from the late-1960s and early… read more