Road Show: Travel Papers in American Literature now on view at Beinecke

  • Three women on board a ship
    Margaret Anderson, Louise Davidson, and Mme. Georgette LeBlanc aboard the Ile de France, from the Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret C. Anderson.
September 1, 2021

An exhibition highlighting the work and voyages of writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Bennett, Truman Capote and Annie Dillard, opens today at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 


“Road Show: Travel Papers in American Literature” celebrates the American love of travel and adventure in both literary works and the real-life journeys that have inspired some of our most beloved books. It explores literary archives and the various ways travel is recorded, marked, and documented in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Materials in the exhibition include passports and visas, postcards and letters, travel guides and language lessons, photographs, artworks, and travelers’ notebooks. Along with other archival documents, they attest to the physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences of moving through unfamiliar places, encountering new landscapes and people, and exploring different ways of life and world views.

Road Show was organized by Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature with the assistance of student curators Raffaella Donatich ‘19; Isabelle Laurenzi, doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science; and Rachel Kaufman ‘19. It is accompanied by a companion exhibition, Imaginary Voyages, organized by Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts. Read more on the Beinecke Library website.

The Beinecke Library is currently open to Yale students, faculty and staff who are authorized to be on campus. Yale IDs and masks are required to enter Yale libraries.