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Brag Bag: Works Inspired by RBML’s Collections

Never a Lovely So Real : the life and work of Nelson Algren. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019)

Author: Colin Asher

Algren was friends with Carl Sandburg and Edwin Rolfe. Asher’s biography cites letters from Algren held in our Sandburg and Rolfe archives.


The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World. (Viking/Penguin, Nov. 2021)

Author: Claire Tomalin

The noted biographer Claire Tomalin’s just published work on H. G. Wells has received numerous positive reviews. Drawing on sources held in RBML’s vast archive of Wells materials, it prints several photographs from our collections and excerpts the correspondence between Wells and his lover Amber Reeves. A selection from Tomalin’s book detailing Wells’s successful escape from a draper’s existence is available here on Literary Hub.

Michael Sherborne, author of H. G. Wells : Another Kind of Life (2010) and a sponsored Velde Visiting Scholar to RBML in 2006, has just written favorably of Tomalin’s work in the November 5th Times Literary Supplement. The TLS’s fascinating podcast exchange with Sherborne on Tomalin’s achievement (as well as reaction to J. S. Barne’s The City of Dr. Moreau, a contemporary sequel(!) to Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau) is available here.


H.G. Wells and the Empire: The Artist and the Intellectual.

Author: Tiziano De Marino. Doctoral dissertation (Sapienza Università di Roma,) defended July 2021.

Dr. De Marino conducted research for his doctoral work as a Visiting Scholar and IFUSS Research Fellow in the H.G. Wells papers in 2019. This research has also inspired an essay in the July 2021 issue of Science Fiction Studies (DePauw University) “The Ethics of Empire: H. G. Wells Re-Writing R. L. Stevenson” (Vol. 48, No. 2, July 2021, pp. 243-262.)


The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 4. The Plays. 1682–1696.
Edited by Rachel Adcock, Kate Aughterson, Claire Bowditch, Elaine Hobby, Alan James Hogarth, Anita Pacheco and Margarete Rubik.
Date: March 2021

Two of the editors, Dr. Claire Bowditch and Dr. Elaine Hobby, our 2015 John “Bud” Velde Visiting Scholars, spent weeks in the RBML reading room collating the text of several plays by Aphra Behn from first editions of Behn’s plays held in our collections. Seven more volumes are planned: plays, poetry, fiction…


The Four Curves of Alexis Clairaut
Authors: Taner Kiral (Wabash College), Jonathan Murdock (Wabash College), and Colin B. P. McKinney (Wabash College)
Date: November 2020

Faculty-student collaboration on translation/edition of a French 18th c. mathematical text (Wabash College, Indiana.)


Proust and the Great War, Part 2
Date: 2014

Online exhibition based on work by students of French 578 seminar and Prof. François Proulx.


Proust and the Great War
Date: May 10, 2014

Online exhibition based on work by students of French 574 seminar and Prof. François Proulx.