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The Harry Ransom Center For The Humanities

by Steven Smith

The building in which the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center is housed on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin has been described as everything from a "windowless box" to a "cold storage unit". The architecture is without doubt the unfortunate offspring of gray Texas limestone and late International Style.

Nonetheless, for anyone who ventures inside, the cultural riches to be found, particularly in literary collections and archival materials from the 19th and 20th centuries, rival those of any humanities institution in the western world.

Once one delves past the gratifying eye-candy at the HRC--a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the world’s first photograph (taken in France in 1826), the set of authentic Scarlett O’Hara dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind--a certain logic to the holdings becomes apparent. Despite the fine Pforzheimer Library containing a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost and a Shakespeare First Folio, notwithstanding the excellent collection of Alexander Pope, Voltaire and illustrated William Blake volumes that grace the shelves, the inevitable conclusion that every visitor makes is that this place is about the twentieth century, with the nineteenth century in a strong supporting role. What is so remarkable is the sheer breadth and depth of the HRC’s literary and artistic collections chronicling this rapidly closing century.

When UT Austin Vice President and Provost Harry Ransom first founded the Center in 1957, he had the advantage of a bit of naivete and a half-dozen very wealthy benefactors interested in bringing culture to the heart of Texas. Anyone who’s ever seen the movie Giant may get a feel for what those heady days in Texas were like--awash in oil money and optimism, families too "big rich" to care about being uncouth (and what’s changed, you ask? perhaps only the oil business).

The particular stroke of genius which Harry Ransom applied to the Center’s founding had to do with its acquisitions policies. Rather than becoming yet another gullible American overbidding on precious centuries-old books and manuscripts at European auction houses (and thus putting the Center into an eternally no-win situation of catch-up with the rest of the world’s great libraries), Ransom decided to focus on late-19th and 20th-century manuscripts, specifically British and American, the prices of which had hit rock bottom in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. More than collecting, Ransom was speculating in an untested market.

Furthermore, Ransom didn’t merely aim for 20th-century manuscripts and rare books, he wanted the letters, diaries, notebooks, post cards and other written materials of the great authors--but who were the great authors? And who could judge? The century was not six decades old.

Thus, Ransom was engaged in a triply dangerous game: he purchased personal papers as well as literary works (a questionable practice at the time), he bought the archives of still-living or recently dead authors (whose status was tenuous in the literary canon), and he risked the wrath of his primary donors, many of whom still believed in the William Randolph Hearst school of cultural acquisition.

The one argument Ransom had going for him, and which in the end won over a majority of his monied supporters, was that Texas could be a truly world-class center for the study of 19th and 20th century British and American literary archives, perhaps on balance even the best spot on the planet for it. This proved too attractive a proposition to turn down for many early donors, as well as for the UT Regents who funded many of the purchases, and the Ransom Center’s course for the coming decades was set.

In 1958, Ransom purchased the T.E. Hanley Collection, with large quantities of manuscripts and correspondence from George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. This single purchase put Texas instantly on the map, but there were more and even greater victories to come: a first edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land inscribed to Ezra Pound, first editions and corrected proofs of Joyce’s Ulysses, substantial collections and archives of Arthur Miller, James Agee, John Steinbeck, Edith Sitwell, Tennessee Williams, much of William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, Jean Cocteau (in the Carlton Lake French Collection), the personal libraries of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce and others. In short, throughout Ransom’s tenure as Director of the Center until his death in 1976, a steady strategy of 19th and 20th century acquisition was pursued--including the famous Gernsheim Collection of Photography that features numerous works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans and Alvin Langdon Coburn.

As the Ransom Center moved from the 1980’s into the 1990’s, under the guidance of Thomas F. Staley, new collections were added and archives were made more available to scholars through a fully endowed fellowship program.

More recent additions (within the last twenty years) to the HRC’s collections include the complete archive of Hollywood legend David O. Selznick, the complete archive of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., archives of Carson McCullers, Adrienne Kennedy, Anne Sexton, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leon Uris, Bernard Malamud, John Fowles, Anita Desai, Amos Tutuola, Lillian Hellmann, drafts for Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", artwork by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, the Norman Bel Geddes collection of theatrical design, the photography of Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen and, most recently, the complete archive of David Douglas Duncan, world-renowned photojournalist and war correspondent from the South Pacific in WWII to the Yalu River, Korea, to Khe Sanh in Vietnam. Dozens and dozens of further archives run the gamut from Borges to Gloria Swanson.

Each year, the Ransom Center seeks to expand and broaden its fellowship program, as well, providing funds for scholars to travel to Austin to have direct access to crucial primary-source materials. The total reconstruction of the first and second floors within the next several years will provide scholars, students and visitors with a remarkable new reading room outfitted with computerized work stations, along with a new auditorium, audio/visual rooms and a large lobby space in which to hold exhibitions.

Despite its recent renown as a center for high-tech millionaires and counterculture hipsters, Austin is still not the first place one would expect to find, say, Joyce’s hand-corrected galley proofs of Ulysses or the self-portraits of Jean Cocteau. But they’re here. And in annually increasing numbers, scholars and students from around the world are coming to the Ransom Center to discover one of Texas’ best-kept secrets.