Main content

Epistolary diary : typescript

Notifications

Held at: University of Delaware Library Special Collections [Contact Us]181 South College Avenue, Newark, DE 19717-5267

This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the University of Delaware Library Special Collections. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.

Overview and metadata sections

A fascinating sequence of correspondence from writer John Clellon Holmes, written for and sent to his wife, Shirley. The letters span a period of nine days and form a personal journal, of sorts, sent by Holmes to his wife during a solitary trip to a family cabin in Maine, touching on the daily routine of practical matters, observations about his own health and mental state, his reading, his writing and painting, his responses to the music to which he's been listening, and observations about the world and his friends and contemporaries. His topics range widely, from the mechanics of opening up the cabin and the extrication of his vehicle from a muddy bog, and comments on wildlife and the weather, to far more reflective matters, punctuated with skirmishes with a painful tooth and the "Zen of Mysteriously Malfunctioning Machinery." The daily record continues with an extended account of a late October visit to Provincetown, with mentions of Kerouac, Weldon Kees, and Allen Ginsberg, and some exceptional comments about his affection for New York bars in previous years, and the ghosts that haunted them. The diary presents a lucid and spontaneous record kept during a few days of isolation, with frequent glimpses of self-analysis and literary reflection by the Beat novelist, essayist, and intimate chronicler of his contemporaries and friends: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy, et al.

Box 68, F0974: Shelved in SPEC MSS 0099 manuscript boxes.

Purchase, 2014.

Processed and encoded by George Apodaca, January 2016.

Publisher
University of Delaware Library Special Collections
Finding Aid Author
University of Delaware Library, Special Collections
Finding Aid Date
2016 January 21
Access Restrictions

The collection is open for research.

Use Restrictions

Use of materials from this collection beyond the exceptions provided for in the Fair Use and Educational Use clauses of the U.S. Copyright Law may violate federal law. Permission to publish or reproduce is required from the copyright holder. Please contact Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, http://library.udel.edu/spec/askspec/

Collection Inventory

Epistolary diary : typescript.
Box 68 Folder F0974

Print, Suggest