Collecting area: Arts & literature

For many years, Charles H. Patterson served as head of the Department of Language and Literature at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Born in Smithsonville, Ont., in 1863, Patterson received both a BA (1887) and MA (1893) from Tufts University before launching his teaching career. He joined the faculty at MAC as an assistant professor of English, in 1916, after 13 years at West Virginia University. A former professional actor, he taught courses in modern literature, with a particular interest in drama, and served as department chair for nearly a decade before his sudden death in 1933.

The Patterson Papers contain a small selection of correspondence and notes on English composition and literature as taught at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is a draft of Patterson’s unpublished book, The Amazing Boucicault.

Simultaneously prolific and tragic, Cesare Pavese was a major figure in 20th century Italian letters. Born in the Piedmont region in 1908 and educated in Turin, Pavese was drawn to English-language literature as a student, writing his thesis on Walt Whitman (1930). Nearly overnight, he became well known as a translator of modern American and British fiction, from Melville, Faulkner, and Steinbeck to James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and at the same time, he began to publish his own creative work beginning with Lavorare stanca, a book of poetry, in 1936. Although sentenced to three years of internal exile for his anti-fascist sympathies (1938-1941), he continued to write, capped by the appearance of his first two novels in 1941 and 1942. The war’s end saw Pavese blossom into an exceptionally creative period, however even as his renown grew, the effects of depression and a failed love affair with the American actress Constance Dowling led him to suicide in August 1950. Two months before he had been awarded the prestigious Strega Prize.

This collection of first and early editions by Cesare Pavese, donated by Lawrence G. Smith, includes first and early editions by Cesare Pavese, five of which are inscribed: three to Constance Dowling, one to his friend Leone Ginzburg (and later to Dowling), and the fifth to Doris and Harry. Smith also donated dozens of other volumes by and about Pavese to the Library’s general collection.

The McLean Asylum for the Insane was founded in 1811 though a charter granted by the Massachusetts Legislature. The original campus was built around a Charles Bullfinch-designed mansion in what’s now Somerville, Mass. and was fully completed by 1818, when it was officially opened. It became the first hospital in New England dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill. The Asylum outgrew its original campus in the 1890s and moved to Belmont, Massachusetts in 1895, where it was renamed McLean Hospital. The Hospital is still active today as a division of Massachusetts General Hospital and is a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School.

The eleven stereographs of what was then known as the McLean Asylum for the Insane were taken by Edwin N. Peabody of Salem, Mass. as part of a larger series called “American Views.” They depict the original Somerville campus of McLean Hospital, including the buildings and grounds and the “Ladies’ Park and Billiard Room,” with women patients on the grounds outside.

Perez Peck (1786-1876) and Asa Sisson (1815-1893) of the village of Anthony (Coventry), R.I., were innovative machinists and manufacturers of cotton looms. Active members of the Society of Friends, they were supporters of the antislavery struggle and sent their children to the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I.

Although the Peck-Sisson-White family collection spans three families and three generations, the bulk of material is concentrated on the lives of Asa Sisson and his wife Mary Ann (Peck) and their daughter Emily, who married Willis H. White, with an emphasis on their poetry and their time at the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I. The family also copied verse from other writers, including works from George Miller (not otherwise identified) extracting Anthony Benezet and “Remarks on encouraging slavery” and a “lamentation over New England” which touches on the execution of early Quakers in Massachusetts Bay.

Marc Peloquin is a freelance feature photographer who has worked for both the New York Times and Yankee Magazine. He has also worked as a medical photographer for David Hubel’s neurobiology research team at Harvard University (1978-1985), and has been an instructor in the School of Journalism at Boston University (1987-1988).

The photographs in the Peloquin Collection are associated with projects undertaken for Yankee Magazine during the 1980s, and many are accompanied by related correspondence and notes. Most images are 35mm color slides, although there are handful of black and white negatives, and the topics of the sessions include the professional wrestler Killer Kowalski, the New England Aquarium, George Plimpton, Walden Pond, and Henry David Thoreau’s hut.

Photographs of individuals from and scenes of Laos taken by Joel Halpern and Sam Pettingill dating from the 1950s. Also includes grant applications, correspondence, and publicity materials related to an exhibition of the photographs.

Cover of Avatar volume 1, number 4

Suzanne Petrucci (neé Karson / AKA Suzanne Beardsley) was the Distribution Secretary for the Boston underground newspaper, Avatar, which was published out of the Fort Hill Commune in Roxbury and led by Mel Lyman, the controversial folk musician, spiritual leader, and writer. The initial run of Avatar ran from 1967-1968 and published 24 issues until a split developed amongst the staff. The Avatar offices moved from Fort Hill to Rutland Street in the South End. A 25th issue was published and partially distributed before the remaining copies were stolen by the Fort Hill contingent. Shortly after this incident, an Avatar board member, David Wilson, of the music publication Broadside, and Charles Giuliano, a writer for the paper, resumed publication during the summer of 1968. Eventually, Lyman resumed publication of a new American Avatar which ran through 1969. A New York edition also ran simultaneously in 1968 and 1969. Petrucci donated a complete run of volume one of the newspaper in 2023.

The collection consists of an entire run of volume 1 of Avatar, consisting of issues 1-24 and the “lost” issue 25. Also included are a selection of issues from volume 2 as well as issues from the New York edition. Issues of the Los Angeles Free Press and Rolling Stone that contain stories about Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Commune are also included.

For many years, the UMass Amherst campus was home to several colonies of feral cats that took up residence in its barns and outbuildings, and beginning with Leo V. Robinson in 1945, a succession of individuals were moved to feed and care for the cats. An alumna and employee in Human Relations, Marie Phillips (BA ’78, MPA ’91) took over as feral cat caretaker between 1991 and 2007, joined by her colleague Meg Caulmare of the English Department, and together they supported the colonies along the Cat Corridor stretching from the rear of Munson Hall to the Queen Anne Horse Barn. With increasing construction on campus and careful rehoming, the feral cat population was gradually reduced on campus until 2014, when the last cats to live in the Horse Barn, Mr. Junie Moon and Rusty, were given a home by Caulmare. Phillips wrote about her experiences with two of the more notable cats on campus, Dadcat and Ashes, in her book Dadcat University (2007).

The Phillips collection offers a visual records of the lives of the feral cats on the UMass Amherst campus. A strong supporter of efforts to preserve the declining Horse Barn, Phillips also accumulated photographs, reports, and research materials on the barn and horses at the university.

Classics professor Edward Phinney spent his formative years in Colombia, South America. A product of America’s Great Depression, Phinney hailed from a middle-class Texan family that placed a high value on education. After receiving his PhD from the University of California Berkeley (1963), he joined the Classics department at UMass in 1969, where he became an important advocate for educational technology and distance learning. At various times, he served as faculty director of the Foreign Language Resource Center and as chair of the Department of Classics (1981-1992). A popular lecturer who was considered “extraordinarily generous with his time,” Phinney’s Greek mythology course typically drew 500-600 students. He remained devoted to the Classics — even participating in skits in Pompeii — until his death in 1996.

The Phinney collection includes a copy of Phinney’s dissertation, “Apollonius Rhodius,” his diplomas and numerous awards, and selected notes for teaching and research, particularly for his popular course on mythology. Also included are two books of poetry translated by Phinney as well as his translations of Modern Greek poetry written by family friend George Samuel.

Novelist Jodi Picoult is known for taking on compelling social and ethical issues and weaving them into the works of fiction that have won her a devoted readership. From her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992), to her recent bestseller By Any Other Name (2024), Picoult has grappled with a range of topics: fractured families, eugenics, school violence, teen suicide, spouse abuse, a child’s legal rights, childhood cancer, gay rights, the death penalty, war criminals, vengeance, justice, faith, the value of life. To Picoult, a passionate researcher, no issue is simple. Through her characters and her stories she engages the complications, considering provocative questions from different angles. Born in 1966, Picoult graduated from Princeton, where she majored in creative writing, and Harvard, where she earned her M.Ed. A longtime supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, especially for queer youth, who also speaks out against censorship and book bans, she and her husband have three grown children and live in Hanover, N.H.

The Jodi Picoult Papers, richly documenting the author’s work process, include research files for Picoult’s novels—correspondence, notes, manuscript pages, and other background material—as well as some drafts, editorial correspondence, clippings, publicity material, early stories, and student material. Also in Special Collections is a comprehensive collection of Picoult’s publications, including the novels in American and foreign-language editions.