Literature

Saul Bellow has been called the greatest writer of American prose of the 20th century. Zachary Leader, professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton, explores this claim and tests it. This talk was part of the Ridge Lecture series at the Huntington.

Kenneth Warren, professor of English at the University of Chicago and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow for 2010–11, examines how the rise of segregation in the late 19th century created an imperative among black writers to produce a distinctive African American literature.

David Hall discusses the challenges of writing and publishing in colonial America, when authors sent documents to England for publication, only to see them altered dramatically by far-away editors and printers. Hall is professor of New England church history at the Harvard Divinity School. He delivered the annual Zamorano Lecture, an event sponsored by the Zamorano Club, Southern California’s oldest organization of bibliophiles and manuscript collectors.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to Pasadena to live in 1888. Here she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a harrowing story of a woman’s descent into madness, fueled by her own experience. Helen Horowitz, professor of history, Smith College, and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2010–11, considers Gilman’s life in Pasadena and the making of the story.

The famous relationship between lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his friend and biographer, James Boswell, is discussed in a lecture by Paul Ruxin. A noted expert on this literary pair, Ruxin is the owner of one of the largest collections of Johnson and Boswell materials in private hands.

By the time James Boswell published his monumental biography of his friend Samuel Johnson in 1791, the latter’s life had been more fully documented than virtually any other figure in Western history. But Johnson, the famed lexicographer and man of letters, was also the subject of various forms of visual documentation. Richard Wendorf , Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, surveys all of the known portrayals of Johnson, including the famous portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds now at The Huntington.

Loren Rothschild, a noted collector of the works of Samuel Johnson, talks about the life and work of the great 18th-century man of letters who compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language.

How significant are books for the circulation of written texts?  The question has become more urgent in the age of digital media, and yet historically books have often been rivaled by other textual forms. Peter Stallybrass, Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, explores how marginal the book has been for some of our most famous writers, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Benjamin Franklin.