Literature Studies (Primary Sources)

The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was the most controversial and contentious program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal." This bold, imaginative and wide-ranging enterprise is the key to understanding literature, culture and society in America during the Depression era.

The Southern Literary Messenger enjoyed an impressive thirty-year run and was in its time the South's most important literary periodical. Avowedly a southern publication, it was also the one literary periodical published that was widely circulated and respected among a northern readership. Throughout much of its run, the journal avoided sectarian political and religious debates, but, the sectional crisis of the 1850s gave the contents of the magazine an increasingly partisan flavor. By 1860 the magazine's tone had shifted to a defiantly proslavery and pro-South stance. Scholars and students of history, journalism, and literature can discern much about how the hot-button topics of slavery and secession were presented in southern intellectual and literary culture in the early stages of the Civil War.

SUR is one of the most important and influential literary magazines published in Latin America in the twentieth century. This collection includes images of the complete magazine, including covers, photographs and advertisements, more than 40,000 pages; a comprehensive electronic index of 6,300 entries, correcting mistakes and inconsistencies found in the index published in the magazine; and a set of images of manuscripts from the first issue as well as an unpublished set of letters by Victoria Ocampo. Note: Contents is primarily in Spanish.