The Stuff of Writers: Material Culture and Literary Manuscripts

Abstract

The process of collecting and curating literary manuscripts is more than gathering an author’s papers and arranging them in chronological or thematic order. The goal of the curator is also to reveal the nature of the creative writing process. This may mean adding artifacts and other materials to the core collection. This article uses the example of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Collection at the University of Florida to illustrate the process of collecting, describing, and providing access to literary manuscripts and associated artifacts and elements of material culture.

Keywords:

• Literary manuscripts
• archival appraisal
• material culture
• artifacts curation

Notes

1 Jennifer Lynn Douglas, “Archiving Authors: Rethinking the Analysis and Representation of Personal Archives” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2013), 168.

2 Lourival Holanda, “Os Manuscritos Literarios: Memoria em processo [The Literary Manuscript: Memory in Process],” Signum: Estudios Linguagem 20, no. 2 (August 2017): 181.

3 Katie Rudolph, “Separated at Appraisal: Maintaining the Archival Bond between Archives Collections and Museum Objects,” Archival Issues 33, no. 1 (2011): 26.

4 Douglas, “Archiving Authors,” 171.

5 Rudolph, “Separated at Appraisal,” 27.

6 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), 3.

7 For a detailed discussion of Rawlings’s relationship with her adopted home in Florida, see Florence M. Turcotte, “For this is an Enchanted Land: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Florida Environment,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 90, no. 4 (Spring 2012): 488–504. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23264717.

8 Maryanne Dever, “Reading Other People’s Mail,” Archives and Manuscripts 24, no. 1 (1996): 120.

9 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 29.

10 Douglas, “Archiving Authors,” 176.

11 An example of how these layers of creation can be applied to a literary archive can be found in David Fitzpatrick’s case study: “Records of the Times: Layers of Creation in the George Orwell Archive,” Archives and Records 37, no. 2 (2016): 188–97.

12 For a more detailed discussion of three-dimensional objects and their curation, see Anthony Reed’s chapter, “Objects in the Archives,” in Museum Archives: An Introduction, ed. Deborah Wythe, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, Museum Archives Section, 2004), 169–76.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florence M. Turcotte

Florence M. Turcotte has served as Literary Manuscripts Archivist at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries since 2005. A graduate of Georgetown University (B.S. Languages and M.A. Liberal Studies) and the University of South Florida (M.A. LIS), Turcotte attended the Modern Archives Institute for additional training. She also curates Women’s, LGBTQ, Environmental, and African American Special Collections at UF. Turcotte serves as Archivist and Executive Director of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society.