English and American Literature

The NYU Special Collections Center co-locates services for all our special collections, including the Fales Library, the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and the University Archives. NYU Libraries’ special collections and archives house significant resources, rare books, personal papers, University history, and more.

This 1-hour video, recorded from a Zoom event with NYU Special Collections and Archives, introduces Special Collections and explains how to visit and request materials.

In this 3-minute video, Nicholas Martin, Curator for the Arts & Humanities at NYU's Special Collections Center, introduces the materials he curated for the exhibition "The Things We Choose: Favorites from the Special Collections."

In this 3-minute video, Michael Koncewicz, Assistant Research Scholar at NYU's Special Collections Center, introduces the materials he curated for the exhibition "The Things We Choose: Favorites from the Special Collections."

In this 3-minute video, Charlotte Priddle, Director of NYU's Special Collections Center, introduces the materials she curated for the exhibition "The Things We Choose: Favorites from the Special Collections."

The range of collections in RBML span more than 4,000 years and comprise rare printed works, cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets, papyri, and Coptic ostraca; medieval and renaissance manuscripts; as well as art and realia. Some 500,000 printed books and 14 miles of manuscripts, personal papers, and records form the core of the RBML holdings. The history of printing, graphic arts, and the performing arts are strengths of RBML.

The original collection, confined primarily to Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, with selected highlights of English literature, numbered 3,500 items. It has grown through acquisitions and gifts to include some 35,000 printed items and 115,000 manuscripts, covering the entire range of English and American literature. Recent acquisitions include the archives of writers Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, and Annie Proulx.

Pierpont Morgan's immense holdings ranged from Egyptian art to Renaissance paintings to Chinese porcelains. For his library, Morgan acquired illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and old master drawings and prints. To this core collection, he added the earliest evidence of writing as manifested in ancient seals, tablets, and papyrus fragments from Egypt and the Near East. Morgan also collected manuscripts and printed materials significant to American history.