I propose that there be established somewhere in Texas—let’s say in the capital city—a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation. Harry Huntt Ransom (1908–1976), Texas Quarterly, Winter 1958.

The history of the Ransom Center officially began in 1957, when University of Texas Vice President and Provost Harry Huntt Ransom founded the Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The true origins of this great institution, however, began 60 years earlier when the University acquired several important private libraries, forming the early foundation of what would later become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

In 1897 Swante Palm (1815-1899), a Swedish bibliophile who had immigrated to Austin, gave the University 10,000 volumes from his personal library. In 1918 Regent George W. Littlefield purchased the library of Chicago businessman John Henry Wrenn, containing nearly 6,000 first and rare editions of mostly 17th- and 18th-century English and American authors, in addition to notable manuscripts of the Brontë sisters and corrected page proofs by Tennyson and Browning. Miriam Lutcher Stark of Orange, Texas, donated to the University her personal library, containing manuscripts by Lord Byron, as well as first editions of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

When Ransom established the Humanities Research Center in 1957, he incorporated the older rare book collections into a new initiative for rare book and manuscript collection development. With the acquisition in 1958 of the massive library of Edward Alexander Parsons, consisting of 40,000 volumes and 8,000 manuscripts, Ransom ushered the University into an era of intense collecting.

That same year Ransom purchased the T. E. Hanley Library, replete with large quantities of modern literary manuscripts. It was this acquisition, with its collections of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, and Dylan Thomas, among many others, that gave focus to future collecting. Rather than attempting to match the holdings of older and more established rare-book libraries, Ransom used the Hanley Collection as the basis for an evolving collection of 20th-century books, manuscripts, and archives.

In 2003 the Ransom Center completed a major renovation, with an addition of 40,000 square feet of public space. The research area was moved and expanded to accommodate additional patrons and modernized technologies, and new gallery space was opened to provide public access to the collections.

Today the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin has as its major emphasis the study of literature and culture of the United States, Great Britain, and France. The Center’s collections contain some 36 million leaves of manuscripts, over one million rare books, five million photographs, and 100,000 works of art, in addition to major holdings in theater arts and film. Highlights include the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1450), the world’s first photograph (c. 1826), important paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and major manuscript collections of Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Tennessee Williams, to name but a few.

From the largest cultural movements to the tiniest fragments of revision, the Collections of the Ransom Center reveal the history of inspired choices in world humanities—in brush stroke, in ink, in image, and in writing.

The Ransom Center Galleries are open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 10–5, Thursday 10–7, and Saturday and Sunday 12–5. Closed Monday. Admission is free. The center is located at 21st and Guadalupe Street. For further information, please call 512-471-8944 or visit www.hrc.utexas.edu.

Thanks to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for the article.