A complex of buildings in the heart of New York City, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. As early as 1890 Morgan had begun to assemble a collection of illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and old master drawings and prints. Literary holdings include the manuscripts, correspondence, and journals of writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, John Keats, John Milton, John Steinbeck, and Henry David Thoreau. The Carter Burden Collection of American Literature includes the manuscripts and correspondence of John Cheever, Ezra Pound, and Tennessee Williams. The 1999 acquisition of the Paris Review archive added correspondence, interviews, typescripts, and revised proofs of several hundred post-World War II writers, including Donald Hall, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, George Plimpton, Philip Roth, and Anne Sexton. The Paris Review Archive also includes audio recordings of interviews with major twentieth-century authors.
Photo by Graham Haber, 2014. Pierpont Morgan’s Library at the Morgan Library & Museum.