The Written Word

The Library’s greatest collecting strength is the written word, ranging from cuneiform tablets to contemporary literature. Writers around the world created these words, in hundreds of languages and formats. Selected from the Library’s research collections, the works shown here include several masterpieces of the Western literary canon, alongside some personal effects of the authors who wrote them.

Among the Library’s most notable holdings are: the papers of Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Annie Proulx, held in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature; the archives of Tom Wolfe and Timothy Leary, the papers of Truman Capote, and the records of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, in the Manuscripts and Archives Division; manuscripts and letters by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Lord Byron, in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle; and manuscripts and other writings by James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ann Petry, in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Please note when viewing in the gallery: some items listed here as "on view" have undergone page changes, or have been replaced by similar works from the same series, to preserve and maintain the valued artifacts in accordance with conservation guidelines.