The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Guide to the Collection

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Robert Lowell has left a prodigious literary legacy that includes several verse plays as well as numerous volumes of poetry. His private papers and other unpublished materials provide a record of a distinguished career and cast light on personal and creative issues of interest to both readers and scholars. The Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University comprises some 2916 items. These include family and literary correspondence, poetic notebooks and manuscripts covering a period of more than 25 years. This annotated guide to the collection is the product of detailed study of Lowell’s work, both published and unpublished, and benefits from the poet’s own review of some of the papers. Researchers may appreciate the index to the poems, which offer a key to the various drafts of each work. This book aims to be of interest to all Lowell scholars and to students of 20th-century American poetry.