The Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) of Emory University is an important research center for literary study with particularly strong holdings in the Irish literary revival; 20th century American, British, and Irish poetry; African American literature; and Georgia authors.

MARBL houses one of the strongest collections anywhere for the study of the Irish poet and dramatist W.B. Yeats including letters, manuscripts, and photographs in the W.B. Yeats Collection; the Maud Gonne-W.B. Yeats Letters; the Gregory Family Papers; and other related collections. The library’s book holdings in the Irish revival are similarly strong, including nearly all of Yeats’ primary publications and many inscribed association copies.

Within the broad field of 20th century poetry, the library has special strength in contemporary Irish poetry and in post-World War II British and American poetry. The library holds the papers of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, as well as the archives of many of the leading poets of his generation. The Gallery Press archive includes correspondence and manuscript materials related to a broad array of other contemporary Irish poets and playwrights. The library holds the literary archive of the late Poet Laureate of Britain Ted Hughes, as well as numerous ancillary collections that further document the life and work of this major twentieth century poet. Also housed in MARBL is Hughes’s personal library, including books formerly owned by his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. MARBL holds the archives of numerous Georgia authors, as well as a number of major American poets, short story writers, and novelists, among them the archive of James Dickey and an extensive Flannery O’Connor collection.

The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library contains over fifty thousand volumes of poetry, including poets from the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean, and other English-speaking countries and regions. The J.M. Edelstein collection of American poetry is particularly strong in Wallace Stevens and in press collections, including complete or nearly complete collections of Cummington Press, Abattoir Editions, Stone Wall, Windhover Press, and the Jargon Society.

MARBL also has extensive book holdings in British poetry of the Romantic Period, the 19th century English novel, the detective novel (the Glover-Greene Collection of Victorian Detective Fiction and the Sir Hugh Greene Collection), and 19th century yellowbacks.

African American literary collections include the archive of James Weldon Johnson, as well as significant collections related to the Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet Langston Hughes and the archive of the Georgia-born novelist John Oliver Killens. The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch collection of African American performing arts includes hundreds of playscripts including scripts by Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, and August Wilson, among many others.
Please see the subject guide for literature for information concerning additional collections. The finding aids for the Irish literary collections are fully searchable via the Irish Literary Collections Portal located at <http:irishliterature.library.emory.edu>.