Donald C. Gallup, a noted bibliographer, editor and art and book collector who spent more than three decades as a library curator at Yale, died Sept. 6.

Mr. Gallup, 87, retired in 1980 as the Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. During his 33-year career as a curator, he helped establish Yale as a leading center for the study of 20th-century American literature by bringing to the University collections of the books, letters, papers and manuscripts of such noted writers as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder, among many others.

Mr. Gallup is equally known as the definitive bibliographer of the poets Eliot and Pound. Famed for their meticulous detail, his bibliographies "were not only important for the study of modernism but were models in the field," says Patricia C. Willis, the current Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library.

Mr. Gallup also is credited with identifying the long-lost manuscript of Eliot's famous poem "The Waste Land" in 1968. As a private collector, Mr. Gallup amassed collections of manuscripts and papers of Eliot, Pound, Lawrence Durrell, and others. Last year, he donated a major part of his Eliot collection -- the product of over 60 years of bibliographic research -- to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The collection includes all known editions of Eliot's works and rare first editions.

"He was one of the greatest book and manuscript collectors of all time," says Louis L. Martz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and former director of the Beinecke Library, who was a friend and colleague of Mr. Gallup for many years. "Yale has gotten priceless treasures, such as the manuscripts and papers of dozens upon dozens of 20th-century poets, as a result of his extraordinary ability to make friends with these authors or their heirs."

The Yale curator also acquired literary materials and art works for Yale and his private collections through friendships with writers Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and artist Georgia O'Keeffe and and her husband, photographer Alfred Steiglitz, Martz notes. He also edited works by Pound, O'Neill, Steiglitz and Marsden Hartley.

"Unlike some people who collect, Donald read and loved the authors he collected," says Martz.

In 1997 Mr. Gallup presented to the Yale Center for British Art his collection of drawings and paintings by British Victorian artist Edward Lear, who is also the author of "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" and other nonsense verse. The gift of almost 400 drawings and paintings by Lear is the second largest donation of art to the center, surpassed only by gifts from the late Yale alumnus and philanthropist Paul Mellon. An exhibition of Lear's works drawn from Mr. Gallup's collection, titled "Edward Lear and the Art of Travel," opens Sept. 20 at the center. He was also a collector of works by French artist Elie Lascaux.

Born on May 12, 1913 in Sterling, Connecticut, Mr. Gallup attended Yale as an undergraduate, an opportunity made possible by a $500 scholarship to students from Plainfield, Connecticut (where he then lived), he recalled in "Pigeons on the Granite," the first of his two published memoirs. In the book, he recounts how he struggled to make passing grades during his first three undergraduate years during the Depression while waiting on tables part-time in Commons dining hall. In his final year, he worked at Sterling Memorial Library. By then already interested in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, Mr. Gallup also felt the first stirrings of passion for book collecting during these years, and was able to find bargains in various second-hand book shops. He graduated from Yale College in 1934.

Later, as a graduate student at Yale, Mr. Gallup used money he was able to earn from odd jobs and part-time work in the library to buy early publications by Eliot, some of which became rarities. He also began compiling a checklist of Eliot's writings. The checklist was first published in the form of a 42-page pamphlet in 1937, when Mr. Gallup was asked by the Yale library to create an Eliot exhibition.He earned his graduate degree in 1939.

Mr. Gallup taught briefly at Southern Methodist University in Dallas before World War II, when he was stationed for two years in England. While there, he bought first editions of English poetry and 19th-century classics, and managed to buy sketches and drawings by Edward Lear, thus beginning that major collection. When his section moved to Paris in 1944, Mr. Gallup began his friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and he later served as a literary executor for Stein. He helped produce an eight-volume edition of Stein's unpublished writings and in 1953 published a volume of letters, titled "The Flowers of Friendship," written to Stein by such notables as Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.

In 1946, Mr. Gallup was appointed curator of Yale's American Literature Collection, then housed in Sterling Memorial Library, and as assistant professor of bibliography and editor of the Yale University Library Gazette. Through his work at Yale, he traveled throughout the United States and Europe as he built the University's collection of modern English literature. He recounted many of these travels in his second memoir, "What Mad Pursuits!" published in 1998 when Mr. Gallup was 85 years old.

After his retirement from Yale, Mr. Gallup served as an honorary trustee of the Yale Library Associates and continued working on major literary projects, including his long-term work reconstructimg a cycle of plays by Eugene O'Neill that the playwright had been planning for many years. His book "Eugene O'Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle" was published last year by the Yale University Press. For his numerous O'Neill projects, Mr. Gallup was named as one of "Eugene O'Neill's People" by the Eugene O'Neill Society in 1995.

A long-time fellow of Jonathan Edwards College (JE) , Mr. Gallup enjoyed sharing in the life of undergraduates. He lent works of art to exhibitions in the JE Junior Common Room and served for many years as a member of a committee that selected the student winners of Yale's Bates Fellowships for summer research. Mr. Gallup made it one of his own traditions to travel each summer to Switzerland for walking excursions.

Of his time at Yale, Mr. Gallup wrote in "Pigeons on the Granite": "I have often thought ... that I ought to have paid the Yale Library for the privilege of being curator of the Collection of American Literature. It was for me the perfect job. For thirty-three years I was allowed to devote myself to it with a minimum of interference from superiors, enjoying their complete confidence and, on the many occasions when I stood in need of it, their unequivocal support ... ."

His friend and colleague Marjorie Wynne, who retired as the Edwin J. Beinecke Research Librarian and worked with Mr. Gallup for many years, recalls the former curator's power of memory, and says "he never faltered in doing exactly what he set out to do."

"Donald was a very quiet and private person, very independent, more comfortable in the company of a few friends (especially over a game of canasta) than in the large gatherings he tended to avoid," she continues. "Gertrude Stein understood him perfectly when she made him a character in her opera 'The Mother of Us All' and gave him these revealing lines to sing: 'Last but not least, first and not best, I am tall as a man, I am firm as a clam, and I never change, from day to day.'"

Memorial contributions may be made to the Donald C. Gallup Fund, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, P.O. Box 208240, New Haven, CT 06520.

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