Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

The Andrew Sarris Papers are comprised of correspondence, drafts and manuscripts, clippings, printed ephemera, periodicals, monographs, photographs, and audio recordings related to the career and personal life of renowned film critic Andrew Sarris. The materials span several decades, from the inception of his career as a film critic and theorist in the mid-1950s to the last years of his long tenure at The Village Voice in the late 1980s..

Edward W. Said was an academic, literary critic, musician, and political activist for the Palestinian cause in the United States. The collection includes appointment books, audiovisual materials, clippings, correspondence, course materials, drafts, journals, notes, research materials, reviews, printed materials and publications.

This collection documents the life of Frank Altschul--investment banker, publisher, and philanthropist--through his correspondence, writing, and research.

Personal and professional papers of the notable literary critic. The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, notes, journals, photographs, drawings and films, and a collection of signed and annotated books and magazines from Dupee's library.

Professional and personal papers of the German émigré scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller. Kristeller was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and a world renowned scholar of Renaissance humanism and Renaissance philosophy who published widely, notably his major catalog of uncataloged manuscripts from the Italian Renaissance, the Iter Italicum.

This collection contains the records of the Research in Contemporary Cultures project (1947-1953) begun by Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and carried out by Margaret Mead at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History after Benedict's death in 1948. The records of three successor projects, Studies in Soviet Culture (1948-1952), Studies in Contemporary Culture (1951-1952), and and Study Program of Human Health and the Ecology of Man (1954-1956) are also included. The purpose of these projects was anthropological study at a distance of global cultures inaccessible for direct observation, in an attempt to establish the "national character" of countries of geopolitical interest to the United States government. These records are duplicates of materials also available at the Library of Congress in the Margaret Mead papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives, 1838-1996.

The Vladimir Ussachevsky Papers document the academic and professional career of pioneering electronic-music composer Vladimir Ussachevsky. This collection contains teaching and administrative materials, correspondence with other composers, writings and compositions by Ussachevsky and others, and programs, publicity materials, and personal documents.