Writers, photographers, explorers are among the subjects of 9 new collections now open to researchers
Beinecke Library reports that from October to December 2025, staff processed nine new collections and added new materials to nine existing collections—including the papers of the American novelist and short-story writer N. Scott Momaday. All the collections are discoverable in Archives at Yale.
These new materials and collections—including the papers of the family of American poet Sylvia Plath and glass transparencies of images by 19th-century photographer Edward S. Curtis—are now open to researchers, thanks to the efforts of staff members in the Archival Description Unit and in the Accessioning, Acquisitions, and Collections Control Unit (AACCU).
This collection contains the personal files, memorabilia, and writings of journalist Christopher “Chris” Ogden ’66—including notebooks from early travels, press passes, calendars, and publications with inscriptions from Stanley Karnow, Richard Nixon, and others. Also included are interviews, correspondence, reviews, and press clippings related to his three biographies, which include Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power, tracing the private and political life of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Photojournalistic, personal, and travel portfolios include portraits of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Andrei Sakharov, and “street art” of Europe, India, Israel, the Americas, and Rome, Italy.
Geoffrey Hartman and Renee Gross Hartman papers
Geoffrey Hartman’s papers document his publications and work as a Yale faculty member in the Comparative Literature department and his work establishing the Yale Judaic Studies Program and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His personal papers document his education and immigration to the United Kingdom and the United States. Renee Gross Hartman’s papers document her writings, correspondence, internment at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, immigration to the United States, and her extensive work with local Jewish organizations in New Haven, Connecticut.
This material documents the highly collaborative activities of the New York City–based Grenfell Press, which brings together artists, writers, and printers. Included are business materials, correspondence, photographs, prints, artist and printer’s proofs, original artwork, typescripts, broadsides, printing blocks, artist books, posters, letterhead, greeting cards, and other ephemera related to and created by Grenfell Press, dating from 1972 to 2021.
Paul Ganster collection of Freddy Fixer Parade photographs
The collection contains photographs by Paul Ganster, then an undergraduate at Yale University, during the Elm City Freddy Fixer parade in 1964—two years after the first celebration of the ongoing annual event. Images include spectators in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut.
The Plath family papers document the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, her relationship with her family, the lives of her parents (Aurelia and Otto Plath), and of her brother (Warren Plath). Included are correspondence, personal and professional papers, photographs, and audiovisual materials.
This collection contains glass transparencies, dating from circa 1922 to 1930, created by the Suffolk Engraving and Electrotyping Co.—that were used to produce photogravures of copy photographs of Native Americans taken by Edward S. Curtis from 1903 to 1928. The photogravures produced from these transparencies and others formed groups of large loose photogravure plates supplementing each of the 20 bound volumes of Curtis’s The North American Indian (1907–1930).
This collection contains correspondence, military papers, legal papers, printed material, photographs, journals, and other papers relating to several generations of members of the Cooper, Tweed, Savage, and Sheldon families of New England, including during the Revolutionary and Civil wars and other significant moments in American history.
Terry Tempest Williams Photography Collection
The collection contains landscape photography collected by American writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams throughout her life. Most relate to her own creative projects and projects she has consulted on. Thematic threads span environmentalism, animal welfare, nuclear war, spirituality, and the American Southwest. Also included are professional portraits of Williams.
William Downie papers relating to exploration of British Columbia
Papers consist of diaries, correspondence, writings, printed works, photographs, maps, and other materials that document William Downie’s life, interests, and travels in the Northwest, particularly during the 1850s and 1860s. The papers offer evidence of early exploration and mining operations in British Columbia, particularly in the Quesnel Forks area by the Quesnelle Mining Company. Downie mined near Sacramento and along the Yuba River in California, in British Columbia, and in Panama. He founded the California town of Downieville, California’s first state capitol. His reminiscences were published in “Hunting for Gold” in 1893 by the California Publishing Company.
New materials were added to these nine library collections:
David Stanley and Ann Handforth McLellan papers
General Collection manuscript miscellany (letter, Henry Hotchkiss)
Yale Collection of American Literature manuscript miscellany (clippings related to Ezra Pound)
Image: “Pomo Mother and Child,” plate from “The North American Indian; being a series of volumes picturing and describing the Indians of the United States, and Alaska,” written, illustrated, and published by Edward S. Curtis, 1924. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
