As an undergraduate at Harvard, Maria Tymoczko was lured away from the study of biochemistry into medieval literature, remaining at Harvard through her doctorate and eventually making the subject into an academic career. Since joining the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1974, she has written or edited six books and has built an international reputation in three fields: Celtic medieval literature, Irish studies, and translation studies. A popular instructor, she has also played a leading role on several university committees.

The Tymoczko Papers document both the career and university service of a scholar of Irish literature and theorist of translation. In addition to her professional correspondence (1973-1980), the collection includes a significant quantity of material documenting Tymoczko’s university service, including notes from her time as chair of the General Education Council (1986-1994), from the Joint Task Force of UMass and Community College Relations, and the Rules Committee and Ad-hoc Committee on Retention of Administrators of the Faculty Senate. Additions to the collection are expected in the future.

Russel K. Alspach earned his PhD in 1932 from the University of Pennsylvania where he taught English from 1924-1942. After four years of service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he spent eighteen years as head of the Department of English at West Point Military Academy before retiring in 1965 with the rank of Brigadier General. A specialist in Irish literature with wide ranging interests running from William Butler Yeats to Percy Blythe Shelley and William Faulkner, Alspach published prolifically throughout his career. He took a post-retirement appointment at UMass in 1966, but hardly retired, eventually becoming Head of the Department of English, and teaching until his final retirement and death in 1980.

The Alspach Papers consist of professional correspondence, drafts of writing, and reviews written by Russell K. Alspach. The small collection includes grant applications and notes for Alspach’s Yeats Study Series, as well as a 3.75 inch monographic recording of readings and music by unidentified artists. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives is also home to the Alspach Yeats Collection of rare books.

Charles H. Patterson.
Photo by Frank A. Waugh, 1926

For many years, Charles H. Patterson served as head of the Department of Language and Literature at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Born in Smithsonville, Ont., in 1863, Patterson received both a BA (1887) and MA (1893) from Tufts University before launching his teaching career. He joined the faculty at MAC as an assistant professor of English, in 1916, after 13 years at West Virginia University. A former professional actor, he taught courses in modern literature, with a particular interest in drama, and served as department chair for nearly a decade before his sudden death in 1933.

The Patterson Papers contain a small selection of correspondence and notes on English composition and literature as taught at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is a draft of Patterson’s unpublished book, The Amazing Boucicault.

MAC baseball team, 1878

Literature and the arts play a vital role in the culture and traditions of New England. Western Massachusetts in particular has had a rich history of fostering writers and poets, musicians, dancers, and actors. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives seeks to document not only the lives and work of writers and performers in our region, but the creative and artistic process; showing not just the inspiration, but the perspiration as well.

Significant collections

One the great poets of Ireland, W.B. Yeats was a key figure in the Celtic literary revival of the early twentieth century. Born into an artistic family in Dublin in 1865, Yeats was heavily influenced early in his career by Irish folk literature and Theosophical mysticism, but he was simultaneously rooted in the political issues of the day. An Irish nationalist by inclination, he became a two-term Senator in the Irish Free State and he was a key supporter of the arts and theatre in the new nation. His international reputation was cemented when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Yeats died in 1939 at the age of 73.

The Alspach collection consists of hundreds of works by and about W.B. Yeats, collected by Yeats scholar Russell K. Alspach, a member of the UMass English faculty. An extensive assemblage with first editions of most of the key works, the collection also includes critical works on Yeats, works by his literary peers, bibliographies, and items published by the Cuala Press, a private press operated by Yeats’s sister Elizabeth that was a strong influence in the Celtic revival. A few items have been added to the collection since its acquisition in 1971.

Born on Dec. 1, 1921, to a middle class family, Tamas Aczel became affiliated with leftist politics in Hungary prior to the Second World War, joining the Party after. With degrees in literature from Peter Pazmany University (BA 1948) and Eotvos Lorent University (MA 1950), Aczel quickly established a reputation as a literary talent, publishing seven novels and winning the Kossuth Prize (1949) and Stalin Prize for Literature (1952). During this period, he became disenchanted with the Communist government and during the short-lived rebellion in 1956, he served as press secretary for Prime Minister Imre Nagy. When Nagy was deposed, Aczel escaped through Yugoslavia to Austria and then England. In 1966, he was invited to teach modern European literature at UMass, where he became Director of the MFA program (1978-1982). Aczel died in 1994, leaving his wife Olga A. Gyarmaty (an Olympic gold medalist in the long jump, 1948) and son Thomas.

The Aczel collection consists primarily of numerous drafts of several novels, including The Hunt (1990), Illuminations (1981), and Ice Age (1965), along with other writing, translations, some student essays, and autobiographical material. Some material is in Hungarian.

Jules Chametzky is a professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the founder (1958) and co-editor of The Massachusetts Review. Born May 24, 1928, in Brooklyn, NY, Chametzky attended Brooklyn College (B.A., 1950) and the University of Minnesota (M.A. 1952; PhD, 1958). During his noteworthy career, he taught at the University of Minnesota, Boston University, Yale University, the Free University of Berlin, and UMass Amherst (1959-present). A specialist in Jewish American literary history, Chametzky was twice a Fullbright Professor, and he has contributed his time to the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association of University Professors, the American Studies Association, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (Secretary of the Executive Committee, 1967-1972). His many publications include The Fiction of Abraham Cahan, Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers, and The Rise of David Levinsky.

The Chametzky Papers document Chametzky’s career as an educator, advocate, and academic pioneer. Included in the collection are professional correspondence, notes compiled for research and teaching, committee and meeting notes, travel documents and memorabilia, and a series of materials relating to the founding of The Massachusetts Review and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A former Professor of English at UMass Amherst and contributor to the Program in Women’s Studies, Margaret (Margo) Culley was a specialist in women’s literature, particularly in women’s autobiography and diaries as a literary form. Her research drew variously upon work in literature, history, American studies, and religion, exploring gender and genre, language, subjectivity, memory, cultural diversity, and narrative. Between 1985 and 1994, she edited three volumes on American women’s autobiographical writing, and another on feminist teaching in the college classroom.

The Culley Papers offer a somewhat fragmentary glimpse into Culley’s academic career and her commitments to women’s literature. The collection includes selected notes for research and teaching, annotated bibliographies of women’s literature, a performance script for The Voices of Lost New England Women Writers, a federal grant proposal for The Black Studies/Women’s Studies Faculty Development Project (1981), and notes related to a study on minority women in the classroom. Letters collected by Culley’s students (late 18th and early 19th century) have been separated from the collection and designated as manuscript collections.

As a member of the faculty in the English Department at UMass Amherst in 1972, Arlyn Diamond became one of the founding members of the Program in Women’s Studies. A scholar of medieval European literature, Diamond received her doctorate from Berkeley in 1970 and became an early proponent of feminist criticism. Among other works, she was author of Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (1988) and editor (with Lee Edwards) of American Voices, American Women (1973). Diamond retired from the University in 2004.

This small collection consists primarily of notes for research and teaching. Of particular interest is a series of women’s studies bibliographies, readings for the Five College Women’s Studies Faculty Seminar (Autumn 1977), graduate level feminist theory courses, and notes related to the history of women’s studies. Also included among the papers are financial records from the 1977 Five College Women’s Studies Faculty Seminar.

Beauvais Missal

The scholar of book history Otto F. Ege disassembled works from his personal collection of medieval manuscripts to create forty portfolios of fifty leaves each, offering these sets for sale to individuals and institutions under the title “Fifty Original Leaves From Medieval Manuscripts.” Marketing his portfolios as a resource for study of the history of the book, book illustration, and paleography, Ege justified his biblioclastic enterprise as a means of sharing the beauties of Medieval books with a wider audience.

The majority of the texts scavenged for Otto Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves From Medieval Manuscripts” (all but one in Latin) are liturgical in origin — Bibles, psalters, missals, breviaries, and Books of Hours — however Ege also included a few less common works such as the 15th-century manuscript of Livy’s History of Rome and a version of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The leaves range in date from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century and represent a number of distinctive regional styles in paleography and illumination from throughout western Europe, including Italy, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and England. The UMass Amherst set is number six of 40.