To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity.
-Edmund Wilson, Jr.
Edmund Wilson, Jr., was a writer-editor and literary critic best known today for his book “To the Finland Station.” Wilson goes on to say the writer must learn “…to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings.”
Many Kluge Center researchers have worked closely with librarians and curators located in the Library’s many reading rooms to uncover those “notices of ephemeral happenings” so they might shape a grounded narrative. In this blog it is only possible to mention a few such collaborative efforts, however, I hope that doing so will give you an insight into the everyday engagement of Kluge Center scholars with both the collections and the staff of the Library of Congress.
The Humanities and Social Science Division (the Main Reading Room) has provided substantial help to many Kluge Center fellows including Naomi Wood, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow, and Daniel Brook, a Black Mountain Institute-Kluge Fellow, enabling them to produce:
- Wood, Naomi. “Mrs. Hemingway.” New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
- Brook, Daniel. “History of Future Cities.” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013.
The Library’s Hispanic Division worked with Marie Arana, a member of the Library’s Scholars Council, as well as Kluge Fellows Mark Anderson and Jamie Sanders, and Kislak Fellow, Michael Francis, to help them to produce:
- Arana, Marie. “Bolivar: American Liberator.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
- Anderson, Mark D. “Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America.” Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
- Sanders, James. “The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
- Francis, J. Michael and Kole, Kathleen M. “Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan and the Guale Uprising of 1597.” American Museum of Natural History, 2011.
The Music Division provided resources that enabled Vic Hobson, an AHRC Fellow, to study the origin of blues music and for Dario Sarlo, a Kluge Fellow, and Alexandra Wiktorik Sarlo, a Kluge Center research intern, to translate and to edit a book originally written in Russian:
- Hobson, Vic. “Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues.” Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2014.
- Kopytova, Galina. “Jascha Heifetz: Early Years in Russia.” (Dario Sarlo & Alexandra Sarlo trans. & ed.). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Kluge Prize winner Romila Thapar worked closely with the Library’s Asian Division on a number of research efforts. Her latest book is:
- Thapar, Romila. “The Past before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Kluge Fellow Johanna Bockman made extensive use of materials in the European Division Reading Room.
- Bockman, Joanna. “Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism.” Stanford University Press, 2011.
The Manuscript Division has worked closely with many of the Center’s scholars: including Kluge Fellows Maya Jasanoff and Kip Kosek:
- Jasanoff, Maya. “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War.” New York: Knopf, 2011.
- Kosek, Joseph K. “Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy.” New York: Columbia University Press. 2009.
The Law Library of Congress has provided materials for many of our scholars including Kluge Fellow Jason Blokhuis.
- Blokhuis, J. C., et al. “Education Law.” New York: Routledge Press, 2014.
Reference librarians and curators provide a portal to information and, as Edmund Wilson, Jr. would say, it is the researcher/writer’s job “to develop resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces of miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects.” In that collaboration and through the work that follows lay a certain alchemy.