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The Ivy League Patricia C. Willis The literary archives of many Yale alumni and others adopted through honorary degrees have been acquired by the library, beginning with Joel Barlow, 1778, and James Fenimore Cooper, 1806. The twentieth-century move to preserve extensive archives has resulted in the acquisition of papers of more recent writers. Among them are a trio who graduated in 1907. William Rose Benét worked on the Yale Daily News and applied that experience to a lifetime of literary journalism, first at The Century and later at The Saturday Review of Literature. His brother, Stephen Vincent Benét, 1919, and the rest of his family, including wife Elinor Wylie and sister Laura Benét, are part of the collection. Leonard Bacon became a professor of English at Berkeley and no doubt found his undergraduate years as well as his teaching experiences good sources for his volume of satiric verse, PhDs. Sinclair Lewis chose small-town Minnesota for the material of his famous novels Main Street and Babbitt; his papers include his detailed map of "Gopher Prairie," the name under which he satirized his home town, Sauk Centre. John Hersey, 1936, worked as secretary for Sinclair Lewis before becoming a correspondent for Time and undertaking his novels related to World War II, Hiroshima and A Bell for Adano. J. P. Marquand, 1950 Hon., concentrated on the Massachusetts of his college years to create The Late George Apley, the tale of a Boston Brahmin who fought a changing society. Robert Penn Warren, Hon. 1952, distinguished in fiction, drama, and poetry, was first known for All the King's Men and its fabled characterization of the governor of Louisiana as "Willie Stark." All of these Yale graduates and honorees won at least one Pulitzer Prize, except Sinclair Lewis who declined the Pulitzer while accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature. Robert Penn Warren also taught at Yale, as did his long-time friend Cleanth Brooks. Together they edited the Southern Review while young faculty members at Louisiana State University. As pioneers of the New Criticism, they wrote Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, works studied by successive generations of college students. Combined, their correspondence takes in the reigning southern writers of their era, including John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, Andrew Lytle, and Allen Tate. The papers of three other faculty members are closely connected with other parts of the collections. Norman Holmes Pearson, 1932, who taught English at Yale, became the friend and confidant of H.D. and Bryher (whose papers are in the general collection), spending time with them in London while he served in the Office of Strategic Services. F. O. Matthiessen, 1924, spent most of his professional career at Harvard where he produced one of the first book-length critical studies of T. S. Eliot, thereby compelling academic interest in modernism barely a decade after "The Waste Land" appeared in The Dial. Hermann Hagedorn, known primarily as a poet and novelist, taught undergraduate English at Harvard and came down hard on themes and poems by Scofield Thayer, perhaps forcing his aesthetic pupil towards his life work of editing The Dial rather than writing poetry.  Comments:Ellen R.
Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu |