Margaret Higonnet, professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, remembers reading the books in her father’s extensive library at her childhood home in St. Louis, starting with the stack of Jane Austens and reading through the Virginia Woolfs.
Her father, Guy Adams Cardwell Jr., a Mark Twain Scholar, had a collection of more than 500 books of American fiction, poetry, history, and criticism. That collection is now available to scholars in a new American Studies Library in the CLAS building on the Storrs campus.
Higonnet donated the books, bringing them here box by box from her father’s last apartment in Lexington, Mass. He died in 2005, one month short of his 100th birthday, still writing about Twain until the end of his life.
The collection, carefully catalogued, is now being supplemented with books donated by other faculty members. It is a rich repository of first editions, collected works, and memorable materials, such as poet Elizabeth Alexander’s personally inscribed chapbook of her poem for President Obama’s inaugural, “Praise Song for the Day.”
The library includes Melville’s and Twain’s letters, Faulkner criticism, 19th century humorists, and works ranging from Hawthorne to modern poets. It has works by Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Arthur Schlesinger, and Don DeLillo.
If you want to study the collected works of Poe, they are on the shelves, along with first editions of modern poetry and novels by Saul Bellow and James Dickey.
Thick critical editions of Twain’s work from the University of California Press are there. Cardwell was a Twain specialist who taught American literature and the modern novel. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna in 1951, when the city was still occupied, and he had a Smith-Mundt grant to lecture in Argentina, where Jorge Luis Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina and gave him a tour. The collection includes An Introduction to American Literature by Borges.
Cardwell taught at Tulane, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and SUNY Binghamton, and he chaired the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis for many years.
Higonnet was compiling a book of her father’s own poems and short stories for his 100th birthday, but he died before it was completed.
Her own scholarly interests include comparative literature – she formerly headed the program at UConn and was president of the American Comparative Literature Association – World War I literature, and children’s literature; she edited Children’s Literature for seven years. Last fall she was named a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society in honor of her historical work on American women in World War I.
But her path as a literary scholar might have been mapped by that early exposure to great books in her father’s library, now available for UConn students and faculty to enjoy.
Scholars who want to use the library, which is normally locked, should contact Anna Mae Duane, director of American Studies. The “unofficial librarian,” is Kathryn Kornacki, a Ph.D. student.
