Most of the books that came to The University of Texas at Austin as part of the John Henry Wrenn Library didn’t look like old books when they arrived in 1918 and still don’t look old now—not as old, at least, as the publication dates of the printed pages inside would suggest. [Read more…] about Revealing an English Schoolmaster’s Piers Plowman
literature
Celebrating 100 years of Doris Lessing
Nobel Prize–winning author Doris Lessing was born one hundred years ago, on October 22, 1919. [Read more…] about Celebrating 100 years of Doris Lessing
Rachel Cusk’s papers acquired
The papers of acclaimed author Rachel Cusk (b. 1967) have been acquired by the Ransom Center.
The Weather of Domestic Life
The Ransom Center acquires the papers of Rachel Cusk. Below, Cusk describes her writing process.
When I was writing my first novel I frequently dreamed that the house I was living in was on fire and that I was unable to rescue the manuscript. I took this same manuscript with me everywhere I went: the exteriorising of what was inside me, the creation of it as a physical object, was so momentous and alarming that I often felt more like its guardian than its author.
The word on the streets
During the modernist era, writers experimented with the language of the street in their works. Brooks Hefner’s The Word on the Streets explores how multiple writers of different genres used street slang to emphasize classism through dialect. At the Ransom Center, Hefner consulted the archives of influential detective fiction writers Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner to inform his book. [Read more…] about The word on the streets
American publishing during the Cold War
In Amanda Laugesen’s new book, the novel is an object of war. In Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), Laugesen tells the story of Franklin Publications, a publishing company created in 1952 as a joint project between American publishers and the USIA. Amid the scramble for influence during the Cold War, Franklin was tasked with disseminating books that promote American ideals throughout the developing world. [Read more…] about American publishing during the Cold War