Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 28, 2000

Volume 28, Number 18

Ex-curator donates T.S. Eliot archive to Beinecke

As a young graduate student at Yale, Donald C. Gallup used money he scraped together from odd jobs and part-time work in the Yale library to purchase early publications by T.S. Eliot, many of which are now rare.

Gallup, also an alumnus of Yale College, continued to collect works by and about the famous poet while serving for more than 30 years as curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. Last month, he donated major portions of his T.S. Eliot collection -- the product of over 60 years of bibliographic research -- to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The gift includes books and pamphlets by Eliot, including all known editions of his works and most variant printings. In addition, it includes periodicals and anthologies containing texts by Eliot as well as over 400 publications about the poet. Gallup had previously donated to the Beinecke his extensive collection of Eliot in translation and more than 100 books with titles taken from Eliot poems.

"This world-class collection of T.S. Eliot is a spectacular addition to the Beinecke's extensive holdings in the area of modernism," says Ralph W. Franklin, director of the Beinecke Library. "Donald's work as curator, bibliographer and private collector has made Yale a leading center for the study of 20th-century American literature."

Among the greatest rarities in Gallup's T.S. Eliot collection are the first editions of the poet's first three works: "Prufrock, and Other Observations" (1917), which is inscribed by the author; Eliot's volume about the work of his contemporary, poet Ezra Pound, titled "Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry" (1917); and "Poems" (1919), present in two copies representing the first and second state of the first edition.

The collection also includes such rarities as six printing and binding variants of Eliot's third book of poems, "Ara Vus Prec" (1920), two of which contain inscriptions by the author.

Gallup, who graduated from Yale College in 1934 and earned his graduate degree from the University in 1939, is the author of "T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography," a definitive work for Eliot studies and in the field of bibliography. The book traces its roots to a checklist of Eliot publications that Gallup compiled in 1936 as a graduate student. The checklist was first published in the form of a 42-page pamphlet in 1937, when Gallup was asked by the Yale Library to create an Eliot exhibition.

Gallup's collection of T.S. Eliot materials grew in tandem with his bibliography of the poet. A second edition of the bibliography was published in 1947, the occasion of another library exhibition in connection with a reading by Eliot, who received an honorary degree from Yale that same year. Faber & Faber, Eliot's publisher in England, brought out the next edition of the Gallup bibliography in 1954. The most recent edition, which is 414 pages, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1969.

Gallup, who was a library curator at Yale from 1947 until his retirement in 1980, has donated several of his noted collections to the University. In 1997, he presented to the Yale Center for British Art his collection of drawings and paintings by Edward Lear, which was one of the largest donations ever received by the center. Also the definitive bibliographer of Ezra Pound, Gallup had earlier donated thousands of printed items from his Pound collection to the Beinecke, as well as his collection of Pound correspondence and typescripts. The alumnus also gave the library his collections of Lawrence Durrell and of printed materials related to Edward Lear.

Gallup is the author of two volumes of memoirs, "Pigeons on the Granite" and "What Mad Pursuits!" He also edited for publication writings by his former friends Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, and has been celebrated in this country and abroad for his work on Eugene O'Neill.

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