Collection

The Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature

The Clifton Waller Barrett Library takes as its province one hundred and seventy-five years of American literature, the years from 1775 to 1950. It contains, insofar as it has been possible to assemble them, all fiction, poetry, drama, and essays published by an American in book form up to and including the year 1875; for

Jorge Luis Borges Collection

One of the more notable collections in the Special Collections Department at the University of Virginia Library is that of works by and about the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), a distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters. It contains more than two thousand individual

The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection

The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection was established by Matthew J. Bruccoli in 1965 in memory of his father, Joseph M. Bruccoli (1892?-1965), a veteran of the Great War. Professor Bruccoli, a graduate of Yale University who received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia, initially planned to collect the fiction

The Cabell Family Papers

The history of Virginia and that of the Cabell family are inextricably linked; indeed, since about 1726, the Cabells have been one of the Commonwealth’s most interconnected and influential families. This site offers a broad introduction to the Cabell family and to the extraordinary archival material that Cabells in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left

Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs

Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States. His photographs — most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved — provide a unique view

John Dos Passos Collection

The Papers of John Dos Passos at the University of Virginia Library present a vivid chronicle of the author’s activities, thoughts and literary skills as he analyzed, reported on and criticized the turbulent events of the 20th century. Dos Passos, identifying with the leftist radical sympathies of the post-World War I period, experimented in expressing

Duke Family Papers

Richard Thomas Walker Duke, Jr. and the Duke Family Papers at the University of Virginia Between 1899 and 1926, Richard Thomas Walker Duke, Jr., a prominent Albemarle County, Virginia, jurist and civic leader, recorded the most memorable events of his life in five, leather-bound volumes for the benefit of his children. This website contains digital

The William Faulkner Collection

William Faulkner’s choice of a repository for the major manuscripts and personal papers in his possession at the time of his death was the University of Virginia. His stated wish was implemented by the creation of the William Faulkner Foundation to which he arranged to bequeath his papers. They were ultimately transferred to the University […]

The Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books

In early winter of 1986 the Special Collections Department became the repository for one of the great American collections of French books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, arguably the most important collection of its kind in private hands before it was bequeathed to the University of Virginia by the late Douglas Huntly

The Holsinger Studio Collection

The Holsinger Studio Collection constitutes a unique photographic record of life in Central Virginia from before the late 1800s through the first decades of the twentieth century. The collection consists of approximately 10,000 wet-plate glass negatives and 500 celluloid negatives from the commercial studio of Rufus W. Holsinger—and later his son, Ralph. Approximately two-thirds of