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Above the human nerve domain

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    Kruse, Alexander Z. "Teach Yourself How to Draw:" manuscript mock-up—another version of the item listed above; handwritten and typed notes, taped-together pages, drawings, etc. Prototype for How to Draw and Paint. (very fragile), ca.1950

    Manuscripts

    The Alexander Z. Kruse papers contain documents relating to Kruse's career as an artist, art critic, and author. The time frame covered is 1890 to 1975 with the bulk of the material originating from the 1930s to 1960s. The material is arranged by functional series and includes: literary manuscripts and notebooks; correspondence; photographic materials--photographs and slides; ephemera--clippings, catalogs, and biographical material; and books. The majority of the collection is in its original format with a few being photocopies. The photographic materials are in good condition. However, much of the ephemera (especially the newspaper clippings) is extremely fragile. Most of the clippings are from Kruse's columns with the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Post.

    mssKruse papers

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    Wallace Stevens Oral History Collection

    Manuscripts

    The 137 oral history tapes and 105 transcriptions, together with 363 pieces of correspondence, that make up this collection were created by Peter A. Brazeau during the course of his research for his oral history biography of Wallace Stevens: Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983). Brazeau, a member of the English Department faculty of St. Joseph College, wrote to and interviewed dozens of Stevens' relatives, friends, neighbors, employees, business colleagues, and literary associates and acquaintances in order to elicit their recollections about the poet. While Brazeau mined the material fairly thoroughly, the mass of information was too great for it all to be used in the book, and there yet remains a good deal of unused data. Therefore, this collection is an excellent research tool for Stevens scholarship. Researchers are advised to use Brazeau's Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered as a reference source for the collection, to identify the people whose interviews and correspondence are contained in the collection. Note: In no instance will the master tapes or the originals of the transcriptions be provided for research. Physical Description There are three formats of material: 1. Tapes. Duplicate cassette tapes have been made from the master tapes (which are in both cassette and reel-to-reel formats). A fairly substantial number of the master tapes are of markedly inferior sound quality, and, while the copies are no worse in quality, it has not been possible to improve or enhance the quality of the copies. The most frequent problem is either very low volume or loud background noise, or a combination of the two. Researchers are cautioned that there is almost certainly some duplication in the tapes for some individuals. This is often due to Brazeau's inconsistent practice of making a second master of a given interview (in either the same or a different format), whose contents may or may not exactly match those of the first master. In almost every instance, the task of exhaustively comparing the contents of two masters proved too unwieldy and time-consuming and had to be abandoned; all that could be done was to copy each master tape unless duplicate masters could be readily identified. Moreover, Brazeau would group interviews on tapes in the most economical manner possible, and these would not be grouped similarly for duplicate master tapes, e.g., groups of interviews on a reel-to-reel tape would not then be retained as a group on Brazeau's own second (cassette) master but would be dispersed to several cassette tapes. This made the identification of duplicate interviews especially difficult. A third difficulty was Brazeau's frequent habit of beginning an interview too early on the tape (with far too little leader tape) or with the volume initially too low, so that his verbal identification of the interviewee and date of the interview are unintelligible. In short, the tapes were made, not by a professional oral historian, but by a Stevens scholar who used the craft as a means to pursue his own research, so the quality of recordings is highly uneven. 2. Transcriptions. The transcriptions have been xeroxed, and the xeroxes will be used for research purposes. Both the originals and the xeroxes are difficult to read, for Brazeau wrote the transcriptions by hand, often in pencil. Moreover, his transcriptions are not complete but are selective; he omitted segments that were not of interest for his own research. 3. Correspondence. The correspondence consists of originals, most in good condition.

    mssHM 53675-54279