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
literature
200 years later, Walt Whitman’s legacy continues to grow
Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819, and amid a panoply of planned festivities, his bicentennial has renewed popular interest in Whitman’s legacy. What has Whitman left us in our twenty-first century? Whatever he has bequeathed to us culturally, what’s certain is that 200 years after his birth, his textual legacy continues to grow.
[Read more…] about 200 years later, Walt Whitman’s legacy continues to grow
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.
A novel discovery
While doing research in the John Herrmann collection during her fellowship at the Ransom Center, Sara Kosiba found a manuscript of an unpublished 1925 novel. Titled Foreign Born, it tells the story of Ernst Weiman, a German immigrant living in the fictional town of Fairbanks, Michigan during World War I. [Read more…] about A novel discovery
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
