Collecting area: Arts & literature

Known for his bitingly satirical poetry, plays, and essays, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus was born in what is today Jicin, Czech Republic. At the age of three, Kraus and his family moved to Vienna, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is best known as editor of the literary journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which he founded in 1899 and to which he was the sole contributor from 1911 until his death in 1936.

Gabriel Rosenrauch, a lawyer from Chernivtsi, Ukraine, collected materials about Kraus and his career, including newspaper articles and essays in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and French written between 1914 and 1962. A few of these were written by well-known authors such as Hermann Hesse and Werner Kraft. The collection features personal photographs of Kraus from throughout his life, as well as photographs of his apartment in Vienna. Also of note are the indexes to Kraus’ journal Die Fackel that were composed by Rosenrauch, whose personal correspondence with Kraus archivist Helene Kann is part of the collection.

The Jug Band visionary Jim Kweskin was one of the major lights of the 1960s folk revival, and an influential figure in Americana music since. A native New Englander, Kweskin was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1940. As a student at Boston University, he was drawn into the Boston-Cambridge folk scene and inspired to learn the guitar, developing a ragtime-blues fingerpicking technique that he inflected with jazz and blues that became a bedrock style of the folk revival. Following a sojourn in California, he returned to Boston in 1963 and formed the Jug Band with Fritz Richmond, Geoff Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bruno Wolfe, later joined by Maria Muldaur, Mel Lyman, Bill Keith, and Richard Greene. The Jug Band developed a national following performing pre-World War II American music, laced with a sense of humor and 1960s sensibility. At the height of their popularity, the Jug Band dissolved in 1968. For several years in the 1980s and 1990s, Kweskin was relatively removed from recording, but he resumed work as a soloist, as a member of the U & I Band, the Texas Sheiks, the Jug Band; and as fellow performer with a long list of artists.

A rich record of eclectic musical tastes and a passion for American music, the Kweskin collection offers important documentation of a major figure on the folk scene. The collection includes scrapbooks, newsclippings, concert posters and fliers, and ephemera from throughout Kweskin’s career, along with hundreds of personal and professional photographs of Kweskin, the Jug Band, U and I, and later collaborations. As an historian of American music, Kweskin also assembled discographies of major artists and labels and built a library of works on blues, country, and other forms of popular music, along with hundreds of 78 rpm records, 45s, LPs, and compact disc recordings. Finally, there are hundreds of reel to reel, cassette, CD, and DVD recordings of Kweskin from throughout his career.

A poet, critic, and essayist, and close friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Charles Lamb was a popular figure in literary circles in late Georgian Britain. Born in London in 1775, Lamb began working in the accounting office of the British East India Company at the age of seventeen. Despite struggling with mental illness in his family, he built a reputation as a writer. With an elegant, eccentric, and somewhat antiquated style, he became known first for his poetry, but soon gained notice for prose and criticism. Written with his sister Mary, Tales from Shakespeare (1808) achieved notable success, however Lamb’s fame rests primarily on the essays he wrote during the 1820s under the pseudonym Elia. Lamb died from erysipelas on Dec. 29, 1833.

From the 1960s through 2010s, Rocco and Barbara Verrilli built this extensive collection of first and early editions of Charles Lamb’s writing. Among the volumes they acquired are Lamb’s personal copy of his first publication, Poems on Various Subjects; a rare copy of his first book for children King and Queen of Hearts (1806); and a presentation copy of his best known work, Elia (1823). The twenty-five manuscript items in the collection are particularly noteworthy. Displaying a characteristic combination of charm, wit, and insight, these include a long letter to Robert Southey discussing poetry; humorous letters to his admirer John B. Dibdin; an acrostic by Lamb on the name of Sarah Thomas; and two particularly fine letters to the poet Edward Dyer, including an eye-witness account of the agricultural rebellion known as the Swing Riots.

Joseph Langland with his wife, Judith

The poet Joseph Langland was raised on the family farm in northeastern Iowa, and earned both a BA (1940) and MA (1941) from the famed writing program at the University of Iowa, before being inducted into the military service during the Second World War. While still in Germany serving with the Allied military government, Langland had printed for his family his first book of poetry, a chapbook titled For Harold (1945), for his younger brother who had been killed in action in the Philippines. Returning home, he taught part-time at Iowa, then joined the faculty at the University of Wyoming (1948-1959), and finally UMass Amherst. Part of a wave of energetic young writers and scholars to arrive on campus, Langland became active in the early years of the Massachusetts Review and became founder the university’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers. A prolific writer, he contributed regularly to literary magazines and was author of The Green Town (1956), The Wheel of Summer (1963), The Sacrifice Poems (1975), Any Body’s Song (1980), and Selected Poems (1991). Langland was recipient of the National Council of the Arts Award, the Melville Cane Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, and a Ford Faculty Fellowship, among other honors. After his retirement from UMass in 1979, he served as emeritus until his death in 2007.

The Langland Papers include a substantial number of original manuscripts of poetry, many unpublished, correspondence with major poets, and an extensive run of Langland’s letters written home to his wife and family during the war. Other Langland Papers are housed at Luther College in Iowa.

Born in Chicopee Falls, Mass., Aubrey D. Lapolice (1893-1981) was a maintenance superintendent at the Belchertown State School for a forty year period, from the time of its establishment through his retirement in 1961. A veteran of the First World War, he oversaw a campus of nearly 850 acres and a physical plant of nearly one hundred buildings and structures. He died in February 1981.

The Lapolice collection includes 35 images of the physical plant and construction projects at the Belchertown State School during its first two decades of operation and 21 images of the welcome home parade in Belchertown in 1946 for returning American troops.

The composer, photographer, and educator, Le Van Khoa arrived in the United States as a war refugee from Vietnam in May 1975. Largely self-taught as a photographer, he was co-founder of the Artistic Photography Association of Vietnam and has published three books of his work. He holds the distinction of being the first Vietnamese photographer to mount an exhibition at the U.S. Congress building.

The seven photographs in the Le Van Khoa collection are artistic reflections of life in Vietnam, including four taken in the imperial city, Hue.

An accomplished concert pianist and composer, Howard Miles Lebow earned both a BA and MFA at the at the Julliard School of Music. Under the tutelage of Edward Steuermann, a pupil of composer Ferruccio Busoni, Lebow exceled as a pianist, performing throughout Europe and the Americas. Joining the rapidly expanding Music faculty at the University of Massachusetts in September 1965, Lebow mixed lecturing and performing until 1968, when he died in an automobile crash at the age of 32. The Howard M. Lebow Scholarship Fund was established in his name in 1968.

The Lebow Collection contains concert programs of many of Lebow’s performances, copy manuscripts, manuscripts of his own compositions, performance notes, and newspapers clippings about and concert programs of other performers. There are also materials that were interleaved within his extensive sheet music collection, now separated and organized by composition. An extensive collection of sheet music has been added to the Libraries’ general collections.

William J. Lederer began his long career in the Navy in 1930. During his twenty-eight years of service he traveled throughout Asia on some 30 trips, acquiring several books worth of experience, criticisms, and insight. In 1948, Lederer attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont and met fellow author and political theorist Eugene Burdick. Disillusioned with the style and substance of America’s diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia, Lederer and Burdick openly sought to demonstrate their belief that American officials and civilians could make a substantial difference in Southeast Asian politics if they were willing to learn local languages, follow local customs and employ regional military tactics. Together they co-authored two widely influential books, The Ugly American (1958) and Sarkhan (1965).

The collection includes materials related to most of his major publications including, A Nation of Sheep, The Ugly American, Sarkhan, Our Own Worst Enemy, I, Giorghos, Mirages of Marriage, and Martial Choices. A substantial series of correspondence traces Lederer’s associations and communications throughout his entire career. Area files, research materials, and photographs are also include, but not yet fully processed.

A writer, poet, and environmental and historic preservation advocate, David K. Leff worked for many years as an agricultural and environmental policy adviser to the Connecticut legislature and as deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). A graduate of UMass Amherst (BA 1975) and the University of Connecticut School of Law (1978), Leff began writing and lecturing from early in his career and in addition to publishing dozens of magazine articles and serving as a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant, he has written nonfiction, including The Last Undiscovered Place (2004), Deep Travel: In Thoreau’s Wake on the Concord and Merrimack (2009), Hidden in Plain Sight (2012), Maple Sugaring (2015), Canoeing Maine’s Legendary Allagash (2016), and Doppelganger: A Memoir of Mirrored Selves (2020); poetry, including The Price of Water (2008), Depth of Field (2010), Tinker’s Damn (2013), The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town (2019), and The Blue Marble Gazetteer (2022); and a novel in verse, Finding the Last Hungry Heart (2014). Leff was active as a lecturer and instructor on various topics, ranging from the environment to local history and writing. In 2016, he was named the first Poet-in-Residence of the New England Trail. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 67.

In addition to containing a nearly comprehensive collection of the published writings of David Leff, the collection includes selected correspondence, unpublished poetry and short stories, a draft of an unpublished novel (Hungry Heart), talks, interviews, notes, newsclippings, more than 400 pages of interviews with sugarmakers that Leff conducted for his book on maple sugaring, and selected materials relating to Leff’s work with the DEP in Connecticut and other endeavors. The collection also includes several thousand photographs (mostly digital) taken by Leff and used to illustrate his publications and lectures. Leff’s extensive daily journals are closed for five years after his death.

Born in Russia in 1903, the realist painter Michael Lenson emigrated to the United States at the age of eight, and from early in life, took an interest in art. While a student at the National Academy of Design in 1928, Lenson was awarded the Chaloner Paris Prize, enabling him to spend four years of study in Europe and leading to his first three one man shows. With the Great Depression in full effect upon his return to America, he accepted a position as director of mural projects for the Works Progress Administration in New Jersey, through which he built a reputation as one of the most important muralists in the eastern states. Exhibited widely, he was productive as both an artist and critic until his death in 1971. His works are included in the collections of the RISD Museum, the Maier Museum of Art, the Johnson Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Wolfsonian Collection, among others.

Consisting of pencil portraits of poets, each approximately 12 x 18″, the Lenson Collection contains twelve late works by Michael Lenson that were included in an exhibition held at the Montclair Art Museum in 1970. The subjects of the portraits include William Blake, Robert Browning, George Gordon Lord Byron, Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, John Keats, John Milton, Sean O’Casey, Alexander Pope, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.