Samson Occom

Updates to the Samson Occom, bibliography and links page.

OT: Important collection of African American materials

This isn't an update, but it is significant.

From the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13 — Behind the dusty stools and the old towels, under the broken telephones and the picture frames, amid the spider webs, sits one of the country’s most important collections of artifacts devoted to the history of African-Americans.

An early-19th-century edition of "The Negro’s Complaint" is among the collection’s thousands of rare books.

Painstakingly collected over a lifetime by Mayme Agnew Clayton — a retired university librarian who died in October at 83 and whose interest in African-American history consumed her for most of her adult life — the massive collection of books, films, documents and other precious pieces of America’s past has remained essentially hidden for decades, most of it piled from floor to ceiling in a ramshackle garage behind Ms. Clayton’s home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.

Only now is her son Avery Clayton close to forming a museum and research institute that would bring her collection out of the garage and into public view. Just days before Ms. Clayton died, he rented a former courthouse in nearby Culver City for $1 a year to become the treasures’ home, leaving him to scrape together $565,000 to move the thousands of items and put them on display for the first year.

“There is no doubt that this is one of the most important collections in the United States for African-American materials,” said Sara S. Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts for the Huntington Library in San Marino, one of the country’s largest collections of rare books and manuscripts. “It is a tremendous resource for all Americans, but especially African-Americans, whose history has largely been neglected.”

There are first editions by Langston Hughes and nearly every other writer from the Harlem Renaissance, many of them signed; a rare biography of the architect Paul R. Williams; and the oeuvre of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

There is an edition of “The Negro’s Complaint,” a poem complete with hand-painted illustrations; books by and about every notable American of African descent from George Washington Carver to Bill Cosby; and thousands more items concerning those whose names were lost or never known.

The roughly 30,000 rare and out-of-print books written by and about blacks in Ms. Clayton’s collection have never been fully archived.

There is also what Mr. Clayton calls the world’s largest collection of 16-mm films made by blacks; 75,000 photographs; 9,500 sound recordings; and tens of thousands of documents, manuscripts and correspondence: a treasure trove that Ms. Clayton assembled piece by piece, on her modest salary, scouring used bookstores, garage sales, antique shops and pretty much any place where she could find books and memorabilia related to the African-American experience.

The premier collection devoted to black literature and artifacts is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Other major collections include the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History at the Chicago Public Library, and those of Howard University, Temple University and the University of Arkansas.

Ms. Clayton’s collection is distinguished by its breadth and depth of materials, scholars say, including the films, the handwritten slave documents and the staggering assortment of ephemera, and is unmatched on the West Coast. “A collection like this is, in my mind, priceless,” said Philip J. Merrill, an expert on African-American memorabilia.

Updates to queries pages

Updates to the queries pages at the Wharton Society and Crane Society sites.

Updates to the Frances E. W. Harper page

New links at the Frances E. W. Harper page.

Updates to the Frank Norris page

I've eliminated some bad links on the Frank Norris page. Incidentally, the new Frank Norris Society site is here: http://www.csub.edu/franknorriscenter/

William Apess bibliography

Updates: a new bibliography on William Apess; updates to the pages on Apess, Margaret Fuller, and Philip Freneau .

Charles W. Chesnutt

Updates to the Chesnutt page and bibliography.

Updates to little-known writers

Updates to pages on Robert Grant and George Parsons Lathrop.

New Emily Dickinson Bibliography

I've just added a more comprehensive bibliography of articles on Emily Dickinson (2523 references).

Scribbling Women project and Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Although I haven't added the links to them yet, I'll be adding links to these resources:

Scribbling Women (audio versions of stories and plays, including "The Stones of the Village" by Alice Dunbar-Nelson)
http://scribblingwomen.org/home.html
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project (early 20c. music)
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

Link added to Henry James page

Richard Hathaway has recently added a .pdf file of Daisy Miller showing the changes from the 1878 to the 1909 version; the link has been added to the Henry James page.

Wharton's works

Updates to the list of online versions of Wharton's short stories.

Reading questions; Henry James

I'm still organizing and posting the reading questions at the site, some of which are scattered in different directories, and posting more Henry James materials.

I'm also catching up on posting queries to the various author society sites. For the past two months, the spammers have been merciless in filling out the comment forms with junk. Most of the spam follows a set format and is in fractured English or German, so it's easy to delete at a glance. None of it has been posted, of course, but it's time-consuming to look at 20-50 comment forms a day to discover the one that might actually have some relevance. I took down the forms for a while, but they're back up now.

Update to Mary Wilkins Freeman page; some Henry James

I've just received word that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is linking to my Mary E. Wilkins Freeman page; what this means for readers is that they get access to the EB article on Freeman for free.

I've also added some new pedagogical materials on Henry James, including a set of questions for book I of Portrait of a Lady and some brief notes on changes to Portrait of a Lady.

Updates to Ruiz de Burton, Native American bibs & some new bibliographies

Updates to the bibliographies on Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Native American Literature; new bibliographies on Mourning Dove and Charles Eastman

Updates

I updated some of the timeline pages (1810, etc.) and the bibliography on Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance.

Literary stock market

In preparation for updating the bibliographies at the site, I've been running some searches on various authors in the MLA bibliography. (MLA doesn't always have references to books, but it does catch most of the articles.) Here are the rough results:

• Henry David Thoreau: 3050 references
• Stephen Crane: 1248 references
• Edith Wharton: 1209 references
• Frank Norris: 517 references
• Sarah Orne Jewett: 350 references
• Frederick Douglass: 323 references
• Rebecca Harding Davis: 93 references
  
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: 83 references
• Frances E. W. Harper: 48 references
  
• Sui Sin Far: 44 references
  

Addition to the Phillips bibliography

Update to the Phillips bibliography. I'm planning significant updates as soon as I can get through a current project that's taking a lot of time.

Nella Larsen page

Updates to the Nella Larsen page. Unfortunately, the online version of Sanctuary is no longer available.

Updates to the bibliographies at the author societies

Some updates to the Howells and Norris bibliographies.