Posted on January 10, 2019 at 12:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
The Guardian has two articles on what we found regarding to authors in either their papers or others’.
On the plus side, it turns out that Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness — initially banned in the U.K., thanks to a newspaper's attack campaign, for depicting lesbian relationships — elicited a significant positive reaction as well.
Hall’s papers include over a thousand letters of support from readers, some of whom thanked Hall for helping them realize they weren’t alone through The Well of Loneliness, according to the Guardian.
Hall’s archives and those of her partner are being digitized and should become available online in 2021; read more about the censorship campaign and the project in general here.
On a somewhat less uplifting note, newly released papers show that the Nobel committee had doubts about novelist Samuel Beckett’s qualifications, the Guardian reports.
Though he won the prize for literature in 1969, documents from the previous year — which were just made public — show that there was some question over whether Beckett’s work was in keeping with the requirement that the author have written “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."
You can see what other commentary came from that year’s deliberations here.
Categories: Today in Books