Connecting Contexts
The Connecting Contexts: The Modern Literature Collection and The Letters of Samuel Beckett exhibitions celebrate the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)—who fifty years ago this year won the Nobel Prize in literature—with manuscript materials and published texts from the Modern Literature Collection, one of the foremost Beckett repositories in the world; and with information and excerpts from The Letters of Samuel Beckett, the first comprehensive edition of Beckett’s letters, providing access to primary sources scattered in archives and private collections worldwide.
This exhibition is co-curated by Joel Minor and Lois Overbeck.
Lois Overbeck is co-editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett and director of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project at Emory University. The timelines and other posters about Beckett were created by Overbeck. All items in the exhibition were selected and provided by Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection at Washington University. Overbeck and Minor co-edited “Connecting Contexts: Eight Stories in the Life of Samuel Beckett,” which accessible at the Special Collection’s iPad station.
The Modern Literature Collection is part of the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections and is open for research Monday – Friday, 9:00 – 5:00. The Letters of Samuel Beckett are available to purchase separately, Volume I: 1929-1940 (2009), Volume II: 1941-1956 (2011), Volume III: 1957-1965 (2014), and Volume IV: 1966-1989 (2016), as well as the complete set, from Cambridge University Press.
