HARR Y R ANSO M CENTER

Tennessee Williams : : page 4 Gone With The Wind : : page 14 Recommended Reading : : page 13
a po rt r a i t of a di r e c t o r
Tom Staley and the Ransom Center : : page 8
RANSOM EDITION
SPRING 2011
Harry ransom Center

RANSOM EDITION
Volume 19 : : Issue 1
SPRING 2011
RANSOM EDITION is published
biannually for members and friends
of the Harry Ransom Center at
The University of Texas at Austin.
To change your contact information,
please notify:
Alicia Dietrich, Editor
Ransom Edition
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219, Austin, TX 78713
aliciadietrich@mail.utexas.edu
HOURS – Ransom Center Galleries
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Stay connected with the Ransom
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Unless otherwise noted,
photography by Pete Smith
or Anthony Maddaloni.
Cover: Tom Staley.
Cover background image:
Etchings on the first-floor windows of
the Ransom Center that depict holdings
from the Center’s collections.
The publishers have made every effort to
contact all copyright holders for permissions.
Those we have been unable to reach are
invited to contact us so that a full
acknowledgment may be given.
© 2011 Harry Ransom Center.
All rights reserved.
The Ransom Center enjoys considerable recognition for its extensive collections, its
acquisitions, and its visits from distinguished writers and artists, but it is the quality of the
Center’s very talented staff that makes this place truly remarkable. I have tremendous
admiration for my colleagues here at the Center, who support our mission each day with
eagerness and enterprise. It is deeply satisfying to know that the Center and
our celebrated collections are in the care of such bright, enthusiastic, and
immensely talented people.
Working closely with our staff is an equally dedicated group of individuals
who serve on the Ransom Center’s Advisory Council. As many of you
are well aware, the Ransom Center is in the midst of a capital campaign
to raise $15 million to support and enrich the Center’s collections and
initiatives. The campaign continues until 2014, and I am very pleased to
report that we are more than two-thirds of the way toward reaching our goal.
We owe much of our success thus far to our Advisory Council members, who
not only have contributed personally and generously to the campaign but
have also helped attract invaluable gifts from other donors and foundations.
Over the years, the Ransom Center’s Advisory Council has become legendary
on this campus for its support, commitment, and achievements. It is also
looked to with envy for including some of the brightest, wittiest, and most
enthusiastic supporters of this University. The Center is indeed fortunate
to have maintained such wonderful supporters and very good friends over
the years.
Many important activities and initiatives have been occupying our attention
in recent months. In October, the Center received visits from Jim Leach,
the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Sam
Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Chairman Leach
took a tour of the Center and gave an engaging presentation about the
importance of civility in public discourse. Sam Tanenhaus spoke
enthusiastically with staff and faculty about book reviewing and archives.
We also recently added to our collections the archive of writer and
performer Spalding Gray, which you’ll read about in this newsletter. It is
a rich collection that we believe will be of great interest to scholars and
students. And, we are in the midst of several exciting negotiations for new
archives that will enrich our collections in the months to come.
Thomas F. Staley,
Director, Harry Ransom Center
´
DIREcTOR’S NOTE

denotes a link to additional materials
on the Ransom Center’s website
8
A Portrait of a Director
Tom Staley and the Ransom Center
2
3
Recent
Acquisitions
Spalding Gray
News
David Foster Wallace
papers open
for research
TOP LEFT: Tom Staley, Fleur Cowles, and
Tom Stoppard during the 1996 Flair Symposium,
Shouting in the Evening: British Theater 1956–1996.
cONTENTS
Current Exhibitions : :
Becoming Tennessee Williams
and Culture Unbound:
Collecting in the
Twenty-First Century 4
Upcoming Exhibitions : :
Banned, Burned, Seized,
and Censored and
Browsing in Bohemia:
The Greenwich Village
Bookshop Door, 1921–1925 5
Recommended Reading : :
Books featured in Culture
Unbound exhibition 13
Philanthropy : : Fans
donate $30,000 to
conserve Gone With
The Wind dresses 14
Scholarly Publications : :
Recently published books
based on research at the
Ransom Center 15
Before and After : :
Page proofs for James
Joyce’s Ulysses 16
National Endowment for
the Humanities Chair visits
the Ransom Center back cover
Ransom Edition : : 1

Recent Acquisitions
Audio cassette and video cassette tapes from the Spalding Gray
archive. The archive contains more than 150 audio tapes and
more than 120 VHS tapes.
UPDATED VERSION OF GUiDE To ThE
CollECTionS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
The Guide to the Collections on the Ransom Center’s website
has been revised and updated, replacing one based largely
on the published edition of 2003 (now out of print). The guide
supplements collection-level cataloging by emphasizing topical
access across the collections.
Changes in scholarship since the first edition of the guide
was published in 1990 are reflected in the new version. For
example, there wasn’t a Gay and Lesbian chapter in the 1990
guide; one was added in 2003, and in 2010 it has expanded
into a long section on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered,
and Queer (LGBTQ) studies. The history of the book was just
finding its way as a discipline back in 1990 (when it was “Book
Arts”). The current version includes a much wider variety of
Ransom Edition : : 2
The Ransom Center has acquired the archive of
noted author, performer, and actor
Spalding Gray (1941–2004), who is best known as the
creator and performer of autobiographical monologues such as
Swimming to Cambodia (1985) and Monster in a Box (1992). The
extensive archive traces Gray’s career and personal life over more
than four decades.
The collection includes more than 90 handwritten performance
notebooks that served as templates for Gray’s live performances.
The notebooks are heavily revised and annotated, demonstrating
the development of Gray’s most significant pieces. Gray continually
expanded and revised his monologues based on audience reception
and his own changing needs as a performer, and nearly all of the
notebooks contain additional handwritten pages inserted by Gray.
The collection also includes over 100 private journals. These are largely
diaristic, filled with witty asides detailing everyday experiences, pages
of philosophical reflection, dream records, and Gray’s examination of
his own moral nature. Together, the performance notebooks and private
journals provide insight into how Gray’s works were drawn from his
most intimate and personal reflections on his daily experiences.
The collection contains other unpublished writing, including short
stories, plays, and poems. Substantial audio and video materials,
resources. A full chapter on
African Studies has now
grown out of a small section
on African literature.
The entire guide text is searchable
using the website’s search
feature. A new “portal” to the
finding aids for archival and
visual collections has also been
added to the website, which
Plantin Polyglot Bible,
1569–1573.
allows easy browsing by collection name and type of material
as well as keyword searching.
8 Learn more at www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition

First page of Spalding Gray’s performance notebook for Swimming to
Cambodia. This notebook features Ronald McDonald on the cover, and
Gray is seen using this notebook in his performance of Swimming to
Cambodia in the 1987 film by Jonathan Demme.
including 150 audio tapes and over 120 VHS tapes, will allow scholars and
students to trace the evolution of Gray’s work in front of an audience, the
arena for which he was best known. The archive also includes an extensive
collection of personal correspondence.
Gray’s life and work were the focus of Steven Soderbergh’s 2010
documentary film And Everything Is Going Fine. A portion of this archive was
generously donated to the Ransom Center by Gray’s widow, Kathleen Russo.
Other acquisitions include
:: Jorge Luis Borges’s handwritten manuscript about William Blake.
:: A collection of more than 250 letters written by Bernard Malamud to his
literary agent, which include a number of typescripts and story fragments.
:: The first draft of Oscar Saul’s screenplay of A Streetcar Named Desire, which is
marked throughout with Tennessee Williams’s handwritten revisions.
:: The library of literary critic Hugh Kenner, a gift from Mary Ann Kenner.
David Foster Wallace Archive
Now Open For Research
The archive of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), author of Infinite Jest (1996), The Broom of
the System (1987), Girl with Curious Hair (1989), and numerous collections of stories and essays,
is now open for research.
The Center acquired Wallace’s archive last year. The collection is made up of 34 boxes and
is divided into three main sections: works, personal and career-related materials, and copies
of works by Don DeLillo. The works section covers the period between 1984 and 2006 and
includes material related to Wallace’s novels, short stories, essays, and magazine articles.
The personal and career materials section covers 1971 through 2008 and includes juvenilia,
teaching materials, and business correspondence. Most of the correspondence in the collection
is between Wallace and his editors and is related to his work. The third, and smallest, section
includes photocopy typescripts of three works by DeLillo, one of which, Underworld, contains
extensive handwritten annotations by Wallace. The archive also contains more than 300
books from Wallace’s library, many of them heavily annotated.
Because of high demand for study of this collection, the Center requests that researchers
inform curatorial staff of their research plans in advance. To enable staff to best serve researchers’
needs, the Center asks that researchers include the dates of their planned visit and a brief description
of the sections of the collection they expect to study.
8 For more information, including links to a finding aid, an inventory of Wallace’s library,
and images of teaching materials and annotated books, visit www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw.
“Zero” draft of David Foster Wallace’s 2005
commencement speech at Kenyon College.
Ransom Edition : : 3

cURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Ransom Edition : : 4
February 1–July 31, 2011
Becoming Tennessee Williams
With his plays The Glass Menagerie (1945) and
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), the American
playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
reinvented the theater. Drawing on the Ransom
Center’s extensive collection of Tennessee Williams
manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and
artwork, this centenary exhibition explores the idea,
act, and process of artistic creation, illuminating
how Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee
Williams. Williams asserted that most of his plays
dealt with the “wild at heart kept in cages,” a
description, perhaps, of his own life. Throughout
the exhibition, Williams’s personal biography is
compared and contrasted with the dramatic
structure of his plays.
JOin US FOR “WiLd At HEARt”
Celebrate the opening of our upcoming
exhibitions Becoming Tennessee Williams
and Culture Unbound: Collecting in the
Twenty-First Century on Friday, February 4,
2011. Become a member now to receive your
complimentary ticket and valet parking.
Non-members may purchase tickets to the
event for $20 (valet parking included). Learn
more at www.hrc.utexas.edu/wildatheart.
Culture Unbound: Collecting in
the Twenty-First Century
This exhibition commemorates the Ransom
Center’s tireless hunt for archives that will
capture the imagination, invigorate scholarly
research, and deepen our understanding
of culture. Highlighting major acquisitions
in this new century, the exhibition demonstrates
how the Center builds a collection
of interrelated archives that strengthen and
give context to one another. The exhibition
showcases materials from both major and
lesser-known figures, from writers David
Mamet, David Foster Wallace, and Don
DeLillo to Brian Moore and Jayne Anne
Phillips, from journalists Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein to acting teacher Stella
Adler. The exhibition explains how archives
come to the Ransom Center and how they
contribute to our cultural history.
kept in cages
williams
the wild at heart
tennessee
a prayer for
becoming

September 6, 2011–January 29, 2012 UPcOMING
Banned, Burned, Seized,
and Censored
How did hundreds of thousands of books, pictures,
plays, and magazines come to be banned, burned,
seized, and censored in the span of less than 30
years? This exhibition reveals the rarely seen
“machinery” of censorship in the United States
between the two world wars. Using tactics from
extra-legal intimidation to federal prosecution,
censors from the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, New England’s Watch and
Ward Society, the Post Office Department, and the
Treasury Department waged war on “objectionable”
literature. Larger-than-life personalities battled
publicly over obscenity, “clean books,” and freedom
of expression while writers, agents, and publishers
attempted to navigate the increasingly complex
world of American censorship.
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas,”
S. Broder, Office of War Information, Poster Number 7,
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942.
Browsing in Bohemia: The Greenwich Village
Bookshop Door,
1921–1925
As early as 1921,
noteworthy visitors to
Frank Shay’s bookshop,
located at 4 Christopher
Street in the heart of
Greenwich Village, began
signing the narrow door
that opened onto the
store’s back room. When
Envelope from a letter sent from Frank Shay’s Bookshop to Christopher Morley.
the shop closed in 1925,
manager Juliette Koenig preserved the door and, with it, a revelatory slice of cultural history. Signed by 238 writers,
artists, actors, publishers, and other community members, this unusual artifact presents a unique opportunity to
reconstitute the intersecting communities that made the Village an epicenter of American modernism. The exhibition
unravels the dense web of professional, intellectual, and personal connections that may be found between many of
the seemingly unrelated names on the door and shows how a single artifact can set off a chain reaction, revealing
connections and influences that are otherwise forgotten.
EXHIBITIONS
Ransom Edition : : 5

Research at the Ransom Center
Tennessee Williams
ALbERt J. dEVLin
A decade’s work on The Selected Letters of
Tennessee Williams (two volumes, published by
New Directions, 2000–2004) and subsequent work on the
correspondence of Elia Kazan (forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf)
has required on-site research at major and not-so-major libraries
from Boston to Los Angeles. The majority of my stops, however,
have been in the middle, or nearly the middle, at the Harry Ransom
Center, which holds the Williams collection as well as material
pertinent to Elia Kazan. It has become a cliché to mark the Ransom
Center as preeminent among research libraries and to thank the
public services staff—formerly Cathy Henderson and Tara Wenger,
currently Richard Workman, forever Pat Fox—for their courtesy and
expertise. On more than one occasion Rich Oram, Associate
Ransom Edition : : 6
Director, has offered sound advice and encouragement for
which I remain thankful.
The Williams collection was partially organized, I suspect, by
Andreas Brown, former owner of the Gotham Book Mart, who
helped to direct the playwright’s voluminous papers to the Center.
But what the library received probably bore a greater resemblance
to the welter of material that Elia Kazan encountered in directing
Camino Real (1953): “I took all the versions from A to infinity on the
train with me. I sat down one morning and ripped the covers off
and went thru every page. By nightfall I was blind. (I recovered my
sight just a few hours ago, in time to write this). The floor of my
compartment was a foot and a half deep with your crumpled
Tennessee Williams holding a photograph of Elia Kazan, not dated. Unidentified photographer.

Early draft of A Streetcar named Desire titled
“The Passion of a Moth,” in which Williams instructs a
typist to change Kowalski’s name from Ralph to Stanley.
Copyright © 2011 by the University of the South. Reprinted by
permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.
efforts” (from Kazan’s letter to Tennessee Williams, dated
December 10, 1952, in the Ransom Center’s collection). Smoothed
and sorted and dated with astonishing accuracy, well before key
bio-bibliographical aids were available, are fragmentary drafts,
composite manuscripts, and a multitude of letters that cover the
waterfront of taste.
The Center’s collection indicates that Williams wrote often and
“badly” in order to write well. He tested at least eight titles,
including “Electric Avenue,” before settling on A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947). He did not destroy or otherwise withhold the many
drafts of Streetcar—a fellow southerner, Eudora Welty, was loath
to have similar “mistakes” revealed—but, like a visual artist,
unabashedly used “studies” to probe the dynamics of character and
motivation. Especially revealing is an undated draft of the “morning
after” scene in which Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski marvel
at their sexual performance—however enforced it may have been
at first. “Since we’re exchanging bouquets,” Blanche says, “let me
add this one. Everything’s been a preparation for you in what I’ve
gone through. I’m really surprised the walls are still standing. There
was one moment when I thought we were lying out-doors halfway
between this crazy old world and the moon!” Williams has overtly
dramatized the allure of the man who will finally be Blanche’s
“executioner.” Traces of the surprising scene, probably related
to a draft entitled “The Passion of a Moth,” would remain in the
production text in Blanche’s flirtation with Stanley, as well as her
“bouquet,” which is refined of its former dramatic excess, endowed
with foreboding, and presented to Stanley as a herald of rape:
“I said to myself—‘My sister has married a man!’” What did
Williams test and confirm in this study if not the unstable amalgam
of strength and frailty that comprises Blanche DuBois and the
power of Stanley to exploit it?
8
2011 PROMOTIONAL SPONSORS
The Ransom Center would like to give special thanks
to our 2011 promotional sponsors.
A decision made long ago by the Center’s founder, Harry
Huntt Ransom, to emphasize modern writers and collect their
pre-production materials is perfectly consonant with the inner life
of Tennessee Williams’s career. The sheer mass and inclusiveness
of the Williams collection at the Center eloquently bespeaks the
endurance of a writer whose apprenticeship to the theater was
prolonged, whose dramatic “attack” was seldom efficient or
uncluttered, and whose master works evolved slowly in conformity
with alternating moods of confidence and desperation.
Albert J. Devlin is the Catherine Payne Middlebush Professor of English
at the University of Missouri and the author of The Selected letters of
Tennessee Williams (2 vols., New Directions, 2000–2004). Devlin was a
recipient of a Fleur Cowles Fellowship.
Learn more about the Tennessee Williams collection at the Ransom Center at www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.
Ransom Edition : : 7

A Portrait of a Director
Staley in 1997 with the Oklahoma State Constitution, which underwent
conservation work in the Ransom Center’s conservation department.
tOM StALEy And tHE RAnSOM CEntER
1988
Thomas F. Staley is named director
Amos Tutuola collection
1989
Stuart Gilbert collection of James Joyce
materials Penelope Fitzgerald papers
Anvil Press poetry archive
1990
Samuel Beckett letters to Kay Boyle and
materials related to the publication of
Beckett’s Beginning to End Transcription
Center archive Steve Martin
collection
Ransom Edition : : 8
Tom Staley and
the Ransom Center
ELAnA EStRin
Shortly after becoming Director of the Harry Ransom Center
in 1988, Tom Staley learned from his colleague Carlton Lake
that the archive of Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s friend and
collaborator, might be available. As a Joyce scholar, Staley had
had his eye on Gilbert’s archive for years. He asked a rare book
dealer to travel to Paris and visit Gilbert’s eccentric widow,
whom Staley had visited in her apartment during one of his
Joycean excursions many years earlier. Moune Gilbert had kept
the collection stashed under her dining room table and hadn’t
let anyone touch it in 20 years. After much deliberation, Staley
and the dealer convinced Mrs. Gilbert to sell the archive to the
Ransom Center.
But first, they had to find a way to get the collection out of
France and on its way to Texas. Concerned that French customs
officials might block the collection’s export, they devised a plan
to rent a bread truck, hide the papers under blankets, and drive
1991
John Fowles archive Elizabeth Hardwick
collection, including materials by Robert
Lowell Roy Harvey and Julius Patteson
photography collection
John Fowles, date and photographer unknown. John Fowles collection.

it to the English Channel on Holy Thursday when they figured
customs officials wouldn’t be as vigilant. The plan worked, and
the papers arrived safely in Austin, Texas.
Combing through the collection, Staley found much more than he
had expected. Even more valuable than the thousands of Swiss
francs hidden throughout the collection (which Mrs. Gilbert
refused to take back) and Gilbert’s diary (which Staley later coedited
and published), Staley discovered a Joyce scholar’s dream
come true. As he recounted: “I realized that I had before me the
famous lost link, the missing draft with Joyce’s corrections in
his own hand to an important segment of Finnegans Wake, an
item more valuable than the price we had paid for the entire
collection.”
The Gilbert collection was one of Staley’s first acquisitions for
the Ransom Center, purchased only a few months after he took
his post as Director. The momentum hasn’t slowed down since.
Staley has not only acquired many of the Center’s most important
collections, he’s also lifted the Center to its current reputation as
one of the world’s finest humanities research centers. Staley will
retire on August 31 after 23 years as one of the most visionary
directors and a trailblazer in the special collections field.
“He’s one of the most incredible, dynamic, and charismatic
leaders in the library profession,” says Richard Ovenden,
Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director of Oxford
University’s Bodleian Library.
1992
Eliot Elisofon archive Christine Brooke-Rose
papers John Crowley papers
1993
Tom Stoppard archive Isaac Bashevis
Singer archive David Hare archive Warren
Skaaren archive Sybille Bedford archive
1994
Laurence Pollinger collection
of Graham Greene materials
Audrey Wood papers James
Saunders archive Initiation
of the Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium
Logo for Flair Symposium.
“ You could get a scholar to do that
job, you could get the head of a
rare books library, you could get a
terrific fundraiser. You could get
somebody who had even two of
those three attributes. But you
can’t get anyone like Tom Staley.”
From left, University Co-Op President George Mitchell, Grace Hightower,
Thomas F. Staley, and Robert DeNiro at an event in 2007. De Niro donated
his archive to the Ransom Center in 2006.
1995
John Osborne papers Karl Shapiro
correspondence Adrienne Kennedy archive
Peter Matthiessen papers
Laurette Taylor collection
1996
David Douglas Duncan
photography archive
Penelope Lively archive
Hugh Kenner archive
Frith Banbury papers Ruth
Robertson image archive
Leica camera fitted with a Nikkor lens for photographer David Douglas Duncan.
Ransom Edition : : 9

A Portrait of a Director continued
Staley can often be spotted bounding down the Ransom Center’s
halls, greeting colleagues and visitors with hearty pats on the
back. His friends and colleagues describe him as energetic, fun,
ebullient, vivacious, mercurial, charming, dogged, generous,
kind, and a formidable scholar with a wild sense of humor.
His colleagues agree that he is the perfect combination of
scholar, administrator, fundraiser, and friend.
“Nobody duplicates Tom’s multi-faceted capacities,” says London
book dealer Rick Gekoski. “You could get a scholar to do that job,
you could get the head of a rare books library, you could get a
terrific fundraiser. You could get somebody who had even two of
those three attributes. But you can’t get anyone like Tom Staley.
Tom is out on his own. He’s sui generis.”
When Staley arrived on campus, he had his work cut out for him.
The Ransom Center had earned a solid reputation in the years
after it was founded in 1957 but had lost much of its momentum
over these years.
Ransom Edition : : 10
Staley and Advisory Council Member Frank Calhoun
tour the Ransom Center as it underwent a renovation.
1997
Anthony Burgess archive Leon Uris
archive Anita Desai papers Jay
Neugeboren archive Diane Johnson
papers
1998
Bernard Malamud archive Gordon
Dickerson collection of modern British
playwrights Fiction Collective archive
Elizabeth Olds papers
1999
Arnold Wesker archive Terrence
McNally papers Lee Blessing papers
Jorge Luis Borges papers Doris Lessing
papers
Staley wasted no time getting the Center back on its feet. He
refocused the Center’s mission, redefined collecting practices,
established development and public affairs departments, and
cultivated a closer tie to the University. Unlike the two previous
directors, Staley, a professor of English, taught courses and
held an endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts, better
integrating him into the University’s academic community. Staley
quickly ushered in what many consider to be the
Ransom Center’s golden age.
“Under Tom Staley’s leadership the Harry Ransom Center has
moved from strength to strength and has become one of the
most distinguished institutions for scholarship in the U.S. and
indeed in the world,” said the late Frank M. Turner, the former
John Hay Whitney Professor of History and the director of the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
“Over his two decades at the Ransom Center, Staley has
gathered a distinguished collection of manuscripts that are
admired and envied throughout the world of rare book and
manuscript libraries.”
One of his major legacies is expanding the Center’s endowments
from $1 million to $25 million.
“One of Tom’s greatest qualities is his ability to raise money,”
says book dealer George Lawson. “He’s a master of going to
someone and saying, ‘Hey, give us a few million bucks for this
one collection’ and enthuse about it. The man’s probably never
heard about T. S. Eliot, but by the time Tom has talked with him,
he’ll be very excited.”
His fundraising abilities have allowed him to acquire many of the
Ransom Center’s highlights, including the David Foster Wallace,
Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, and Norman Mailer archives. But
Staley’s efforts have never ended at the acquisition.
2000
Brian Moore archive James Salter
archive David Higham & Associates
archive Typescript of Thomas Pynchon’s
V Alice Adams papers Anita Brenner
papers Robert Park Mills papers
Sanora Babb collection
Anita Desai talks with Staley during a visit to the Ransom Center in 1994.

“Tom knows that just collecting manuscripts and archives is
not the end of the story,” says Chris Fletcher, head of western
manuscripts at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. “He sees the ‘life cycle’
of library collections. I think that’s why he’s really created such a
successful institution during his tenure.”
Archives used to get stuck in cataloging, but Staley hired a team
of leading archivists in the 1990s to revamp and streamline the
cataloging process.
“When an archive comes into the Ransom Center, those papers
will be available to scholars in amazingly fast time, which is
what it’s all about,” Gekoski says. “I know that my friends and
colleagues at the British Library simply wish they had those
kinds of facilities.”
Once collections are cataloged, Staley doesn’t want them to sit
untouched on dusty shelves. To encourage scholars and students
to study these materials, Staley initiated a fellowship program
Staley, former Head of Manuscripts Cataloging Kris Kiesling, and former
Associate Director Sally Leach assist in the initial inspection of the Tom
Stoppard archive. The Center acquired the Stoppard papers in 1993.
2001
Sebastian Barry archive Library of
William B. Todd and Ann Bowden,
including prize bindings, Sir Walter
Scott, and James Boswell collections
2002
Julian Barnes
archive Russell
Banks papers
George Platt
Lynes collection
Julian Barnes.
Staley and Norman Mailer during a visit Mailer made to the Ransom Center.
The Center acquired the Mailer archive in 2005.
that sponsors more than 50 fellows a year. Just as he doesn’t
leave archives alone once they arrive at the Ransom Center,
Staley doesn’t neglect visiting scholars either.
“You don’t just feel that you’re living in an isolation block,
doing your work, and going home in the evening, and no one ever
speaks to you,” says past fellow and biographer Selina Hastings.
“It’s all very friendly and rather sociable, and I think that’s very
largely due to Dr. Staley.”
Staley has also made it his mission to invite more than just
academics into the Ransom Center; he wants the public to enjoy
its holdings too. In 2003, Staley unveiled a newly renovated and
much more welcoming Center, complete with a new reading
room, a spacious gallery and theater space, and windows etched
with highlights from the Center’s collection. The Center also
established a membership program and extensive public
programming, including lectures, film series, and tours.
Book dealers like Rick Gekoski, Julian Rota, and George Lawson
agree that Staley’s practices—from cataloging to fellowships to
exhibitions—are a special strength of the Ransom Center.
“It certainly helps me when I’m trying to persuade an author that
the material going abroad isn’t such a terrible thing,” says dealer
Julian Rota, sitting in his book-lined London office.
2003
Woodward and Bernstein
Watergate papers Raymond
Queneau collection Stella
Adler archive Edward
Chodorov papers Reopening
of the Center following its
building renovation
2004
Don DeLillo archive
Ferdinand Forzinetti
collection of the
Dreyfus Affair
Woodward’s notes from the preliminary hearing for the five men arrested at the Democratic
National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate office complex, June 17, 1972.
Ransom Edition : : 11

A Portrait of a Director continued
British writer Penelope Lively says she decided quickly that she
wanted her papers to go to the Ransom Center.
“I feel it’s a great honor for my archive to be there, particularly given
that it’s rubbing shoulders with the most amazing range of British
and American authors. I remember looking at these rows of names
and thinking, my goodness how wonderful to be down here with all
these people,” Lively said.
Special collections libraries all over the world credit Staley with
widening the scope of special collections to include such fields as
film and photography, renewing interest in collecting manuscripts,
boosting the acquisitions market, and raising the overall standard in
the special collections field.
“Dr. Staley has made the Ransom Center a kind of benchmark for
the rest of us,” Ovenden says. “Alan Bennett, who gave us his
archive a couple of years ago, mentioned that he had been visited by
Dr. Staley. The immediate sense of panic always pervades a British
special collections library whenever those words are mentioned.
We regard that as a narrow escape.”
Tom Stoppard, whom Staley has deemed “Britain’s greatest living
playwright,” recalls his first encounter with the Ransom Center in
1967 when he lost his bid for an Evelyn Waugh manuscript to the
Ransom Center. Twenty-five years later, Stoppard sold his archive to
the Center, where it now resides alongside Waugh’s collection.
“I felt vaguely distinguished at being under-bidder to this famous,
great institution, which seemed to have all of the literature and
manuscripts I most liked,” Stoppard said. “It was like a strange holy
2005
Norman Mailer archive Alan Furst papers
2006
Robert De Niro archive Arnold Newman
photography archive
2007
Tim O’Brien archive David Mamet papers
2008
Collection of Ezra Pound materials Creation
of University Co-op’s Harry Ransom Lectures
in Humanities John Steinbeck letters Jim
Crace archive
Ransom Edition : : 12
of holies for people of my bent. It’s always been in my mind a
place of great fascination. So Tom Staley was a man of great
fascination too as a result. He’s always been a wonderfully
affable person. I always thought that his love for what was
being collected was so open. He was somebody into whose
world I felt I belonged. In the end, I was rather pleased to be
in his collection. I keep saying ‘his,’ as in Tom’s, but in a sense
it was.”
Indeed, Staley’s friends and colleagues have a hard time
imagining what the Ransom Center will look like without Staley
at the helm. As Gekoski puts it, Staley is “totally irreplaceable.”
“On the occasion of his retirement, one wishes him some
joy in return,” Stoppard said. “One wants him to just enjoy
his laurels.”
2009
Charles R. Larson
collection of African,
African-American,
and Native-American
literature Jayne Anne
Phillips archive Andre
Dubus papers
Staley, a prominent James Joyce scholar, holds a
copy of Ulysses. The Center acquired many Joyce-
related collections during Staley’s tenure.
An endowment has been created to honor Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley.
For more information or to contribute, contact Associate Director for Development Margie Rine at 512-471-9643.
2010
David Foster Wallace
archive Magnum
Photos archive to be
housed at Ransom
Center Paul Schrader archive Denis
Johnson archive Spalding Gray archive
Playbills and other theater ephemera in the Larson collection.

Recommended Reading
The exhibition Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century features a number of engaging
novels by authors whose archives were acquired by the Ransom Center over the past decade. Visit the
exhibition to learn more about these and other books by many of the most talented writers of our age.
Judith hearne
by Brian Moore (A. DEUTSCH, 1955)
This novel is simply devastating. Moore’s exquisite development and exploration of
the title character, an aging Irish spinster, is as masterful as it is heartbreaking. It’s a
lonely story, but it demonstrates Moore’s adept talent and economy as a writer.
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 1990)
This semi-autobiographical account of the Vietnam War provides a
deeply human portrayal of the wartime experience of soldiers. It also
demonstrates why a former soldier would be compelled to write so
extensively about war.
lark and Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips (KNOPF, 2009)
Lyrical, intense, and magical, this novel tells the story of a young
woman and her disabled brother and the parallel tale of the boy’s
father in Korea nine years prior. The novel weaves together elements
of war, history, family, love, and one’s deep connection and
continuity with the past.
Sacred hunger
by Barry Unsworth (H. HAMILTON, 1992)
This Booker Prize–winning novel centers on an eighteenth-century
slave ship, which Unsworth describes in an early draft as “a minute,
discrete element in a gigantic commercial enterprise that was to
change the world forever, cost forty million lives, bring to Africa
misery on a scale hardly conceivable, to Europe enormous infusions
of capital, to France the Industrial Revolution, to America the
plantation system, the Civil War and the shape of the nation.”
infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace (LITTLE, BROWN, 1996)
A colossal work of fiction and one of the most complex, engaging, fun, and sad
novels written in the late twentieth century. It’s the work of a literary genius.
Ransom Edition : : 13

Generous donations help
conserve Gone With The
Wind costumes
The Ransom Center raised more than $30,000 in donations for the
conservation of five dresses from the 1939 film Gone With The
Wind through an online fundraising initiative. The goal was met in
three weeks in August as more than 680 individuals in 45 states
and 13 countries donated to the campaign.
Designed by Walter Plunkett and worn by Vivien Leigh in a
film that won eight Academy Awards, the dresses came to the
Center as part of the David O. Selznick collection in the 1980s.
The Selznick collection, comprising more than 5,000 boxes, is
the largest collection at the Center. Before arriving at the Center,
the costumes were almost constantly on display and were in
fragile condition. In the words of Steve Wilson, curator of film,
the dresses “were loved to death.” At the Center, the gowns have
been kept in humidity- and temperature-controlled conditions in
acid-free tissue paper in archival boxes.
Jill Morena, collection assistant for costumes and personal
effects, explained, “Most costumes are not constructed to last
beyond the production of the film, nor are they finished in the
same way as a ready-to-wear garment.” Although the Center
has taken steps to prevent further damage, Morena said more
extensive measures were needed to safely display and share
the dresses.
Ransom Edition : : 14
Film Curator Steve Wilson and Jill Morena, Collection Assistant
for costumes and personal effects, with the original curtain
dress from Gone With The Wind.
The campaign to raise funds for preservation received national and
global attention in the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the
BBC, The Independent, and on National Public Radio.
The donations will allow the Ransom Center to conserve the dresses
and to purchase protective housing and custom-fitted mannequins to
allow for proper exhibition according to conservation best practices
and standards.
In fall 2014, the Center will display all
five dresses in an exhibition celebrating
the 75th anniversary of Gone With The
Wind. In addition, the Center hopes the
conservation of the costumes will
enable their transportation to and display
in museums around the world. Any
additional donations will be directed
toward the 2014 exhibition.
8
For more information, visit
www.hrc.utexas.edu/
costumes
Track the progress of the Culture
Unbound capital campaign at
www.hrc.utexas.edu/cultureunbound.

Christopher bigsby
Arthur Miller
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Through classics such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, and The Crucible, Arthur
Miller captivated post-war America and built a body of work that serves as a main pillar
of twentieth-century American drama. In 1956, his refusal to name names before the
House Un-American Activities Committee and his marriage to the actress Marilyn Monroe
captivated the public. Extensive insight gathered from Miller’s papers illuminate these
events in this new biography.
In preparing this book, Bigsby consulted the Arthur Miller collection. Bigsby is Professor of
American Studies and the Director of the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of
East Anglia.
R. barton Palmer and William Robert bray
hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America
(Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2009)
Tennessee Williams has had more plays adapted for the screen than any other
American dramatist. This book draws on archival research to flesh out Williams’s arduous
screenwriting process during the heyday of the Production Code Administration (PCA).
Using evidence from diverse materials such as billboard art, press books, and other
production material, the authors show that Williams used innovative efforts to bend the
code when adapting plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and
Suddenly, Last Summer for the screen.
In preparing this book, Palmer and Bray consulted the Tennessee Williams collection.
Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University in South
Carolina, and Bray is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University in
Murfreesboro and is the founding editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review.
Wendy Moffat
A Great Unrecorded history: A new life of E. M. Forster
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010)
With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M.
Forster came out as a homosexual. Though that revelation barely made a ripple in his
literary reputation, Moffat argues that Forster’s homosexuality was the central facet of his
life. He preserved an archive of his private life, a history of the gay experience he believed
would find its audience in a happier time.
In preparing this book, Moffat consulted the E. M. Forster collection and the J. R.
Ackerley collection. She is an associate professor of English at Dickinson College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
bill Morgan and david Stanford
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The letters
(New York: Viking, 2010)
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated members of the Beat
Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a
deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly affected their writing.
Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on this influential relationship in
this exhilarating exchange of letters between Kerouac and Ginsberg, two thirds of which
have never been published before.
In preparing this book, Morgan and Stanford consulted the Ginsberg papers. Morgan is
the author and editor of more than a dozen books about the Beat writers, including the
biography, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. Stanford is
an independent editor who worked on various Kerouac projects, including Some of the
Dharma, during his decade at Viking.
ScHOlARly PUBlIcATIONS
Ransom Edition : : 15

BEFORE & AFTER
Ransom Edition : : 16
The conservation department of the Ransom Center is responsible for the care
and preservation of the Center’s collections. This feature highlights repair and
conservation work on collection items.
James Joyce’s final page proofs,
Ulysses, 1922
BEFORE Treatment of the Ulysses page proofs was
a team effort involving all the conservators in the
department. In planning the treatment, the top priority
was to maintain the subtle variations of color in the
handwritten notations and corrections found in this text.
The annotations of James Joyce, editor and publisher
Sylvia Beach, and
printer Maurice
Darantiere continue
to be the object
of scholarly
research. These
annotations were
made to the
individually issued page proofs before they were bound
together. The adhesive used for the binding and the type
of binding structure made it impossible to read some of
the annotations.
8
Learn more about the conservation department at
www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition
AFTER Even though the original binding was intact, the Ulysses
page proofs were disbound to reveal the annotations hidden in the
gutter margin. The brittleness of the low-quality paper used for the
proofs, with tears at the edges of every page, also justified this
treatment.
Following extensive testing of the media and paper colors, each
leaf was deacidified with a non-aqueous solution of magnesium
carbonate and then mended using Japanese paper. A custom housing that includes careful
documentation of the original make-up of the gatherings was constructed to
house the individual gatherings of the book.

Ransom Edition : : 17

Change Service Requested
The University of Texas at Austin
Harry Ransom Center
P. O. Drawer 7219
Austin, TX 78713-7219
NatIoNal ENdowmENt
foR thE humaNItIES
ChaIRmaN vISItS thE
RaNSom CENtER
Archivist Jennifer Hecker (far left)
shares the Morris Ernst collection
with the National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH) Chairman Jim
Leach and Deputy Chairman Carole
Watson. The NEH provided a grant
to arrange, describe, and preserve
the Ernst papers.
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