Connecting Contexts: the Modern Literature Collection and The Letters of Samuel Beckett

This exhibit spotlights manuscript materials and published texts from the University Libraries’ Modern Literature Collection (MLC), one of the foremost Beckett repositories in the world. It connects these materials with information and excerpts from The Letters of Samuel Beckett, the first comprehensive edition of Beckett’s letters.

Joel Minor, curator of the MLC, organized the exhibit with Lois Overbeck, co-editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett and director of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project at Emory University. The onsite exhibit, upon which this digital exhibit is based, was on view July-December 2019 in the Ginkgo Room of John M. Olin Library.

The multi-faceted colloquium, "What is the Word: Celebrating Samuel Beckett" was held at Olin Library and Mallinckrodt Center at Washington University, November 7-8, 2019. You can see the full list of speakers and abstracts here and read a summary of each day's activities on our blog. Videos of many of the talks are on our YouTube Channel.

A smaller Beckett exhibit, curated by graduate student Kyle Young, coincided with Connecting Contexts and is also now a digital exhibit, called "If you could finish it..." : Beckett's Revisions and Autotranslations.

Credits

Created by Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, 2019. Banner image from trial proof of line etching by Avigdor Arikha, from the Samuel Beckett Papers