The Dylan Thomas Trust have joined forces with Swansea University and the Harry Ransom Center at the The University of Texas at Austin to use the DiscoverDylanThomas website to share a series of blogs to coincide with International Dylan Thomas Day, the 2021 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize and the launch of a collection of digital Dylan Thomas material held by the Harry Ransom Center.
The forthcoming blogs will include: Dylan Thomas’s fifth notebook, Dylan Thomas’s doodles in books from his library, archive material held by Swansea University, and further details about the digital collection: What it contains, how it was completed and how it can be used.
This is the first in the series and gives a project overview, how you can learn more and become involved.
New Dylan Thomas digital collection set to launch May 14, 2021
By Harry Ransom Center
On International Dylan Thomas Day (May 14, 2021), the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin will join the global celebration of Welsh poet and dramatist Dylan Thomas, one of the most influential writers of the mid-twentieth century, by launching a new digital collection for study and research.
Through a collaborative project jointly funded by Swansea University in Wales and the Ransom Center, with the generous support of the Dylan Thomas Trust, accessibility to the author’s archive will expand to include a digital collection of more than 6,000 items, opening the study of his literary works and creative process to a global audience.
Read more about the collaboration in English or Welsh.
Two of a series of photographs of Dylan Thomas by Nora Summers from the Literary Files of the Harry Ransom Center, The Dylan Thomas Digital Collection. ©️ Gabriel Summers.
The Dylan Thomas DIGITAL Collection
The 6,000+ digitized items that will comprise the Dylan Thomas Digital Collection represent only a portion of the author’s physical archive at the Ransom Center, which consists of manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks, drawings, financial records, photographs, galley proofs, page proofs, and broadcast scripts that were acquired by the Center between 1960 and 2004.
Manuscripts for many of his best-known works are present in the digital collection, including Under Milk Wood, “Poem on His Birthday,” “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and “Elegy,” the unfinished poem he was writing during the last year of his life.
The first of a nine-page manuscript of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” written by Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas Collection, Series I, Box 2, Folder 13, Harry Ransom Center. © The Dylan Thomas Trust.
Materials created by Thomas will remain under copyright and are shared for research with the permission of the Trust.
In collaboration with the Trust and Swansea University, the Thomas collection was digitized in Austin, Texas, using new, state-of-the-art equipment.
The digitization involved an expert team of archivists and conservators, along with specialized staff and students at The University of Texas at Austin.
With the May 14 launch, the collection will be available worldwide through the Ransom Center’s digital collections portal. These unique materials can then be examined using a suite of tools enabling researchers to engage in close comparison of material held by different institutions.
Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood, 1954, bound mimeo script; shortened version submitted for the Italia Prize. Dylan Thomas Collection, Series I, Box 6, Folder 8, Harry Ransom Center. © The Dylan Thomas Trust.
Over half of the digital collection represents Dylan Thomas’s manuscript works at the Ransom Center, which range from the 1920s to 1954, and trace his creative evolution from early juvenilia to drafts of his mature, iconic works, such as “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” Under Milk Wood, and a portion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
Left, a manuscript of the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait created by Dylan Thomas and executed by W. Emlyn Davies. Dylan Thomas Collection, Series I, Works, Box 1, Folder 4, Harry Ransom Center. © The Dylan Thomas Trust. Right, a photograph of Dylan Thomas by Nora Summers from the Literary Files, The Dylan Thomas Digital Collection, Harry Ransom Center. ©️ Gabriel Summers.
Letters that Thomas wrote to critic John Davenport, literary agent David Higham & Associates, poet and editor Geoffrey Grigson, and patron Margaret Taylor, among additional correspondents, provide further valuable documentation of his life, writings, and career.
For more detailed descriptions of the Dylan Thomas holdings at the Ransom Center, see the following online finding aids: Dylan Thomas Collection; Dylan Thomas Literary File, Photography Collection; and the Dylan Thomas Art Collection.
Additional Dylan Thomas items from other Ransom Center collections were also digitized to further enrich the digital collection for research use. Among these collections are those of Cyril Connolly, Leslie Daiken, Charles Henri Ford, E. H. W. Meyerstein, New Mexico D. H. Lawrence Fellowship Fund, PEN, Frederic Prokosch, George Reavey, Edith Sitwell, and Edward Weeks.
The Dylan Thomas PHYSICAL Collection
The physical archive at the Ransom Center contains a miscellany of works, correspondence, and personal papers. Present are manuscripts for a number of Thomas’s best known works, a selection of juvenilia, work for radio and film, and a significant body of correspondence.
Left, a 1954 mimeo script of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood with corrections in an unidentified hand and signed by principal actors. Dylan Thomas Collection, Series I, Box 6, Folder 6, Harry Ransom Center. © The Dylan Thomas Trust. Right, a photograph of Dylan Thomas by Nora Summers from the Literary Files of the Harry Ransom Center, The Dylan Thomas Digital Collection. ©️ Gabriel Summers.
Additionally, more than 60 vertical file folders containing material related to Thomas include newspaper and magazine clippings, printed materials, announcements, posters, souvenirs, and playbills for productions of Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas Growing Up, and the Group Theatre’s Homage to Dylan Thomas.
Art holdings related to Thomas contain doodles, cartoons, self-portraits, portraits, and sculpture, including 27 works by Thomas and depictions of Thomas by Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Rosa Freedman, Gordon T. Stuart, Oloff de Wet, and Gordon Ziegler. One painting by an unidentified artist depicts the house of novelist Constantine FitzGibbon, one of Thomas’s biographers. Depictions of Thomas can also be found in the art collections of Zdzislaw Czermanski, Mervyn Levy, Ivan Oppfer, and Oloff de Wet.
A pencil sketch by Dylan Thomas of he and Caitlin Thomas, which is a facsimile of a drawing titled “Queen Edith Sitwell and Princess Marianne Moore on their first meeting,” a self-portrait, and a self-caricature. Dylan Thomas Collection, Series I, Box 7, Folder 12, Harry Ransom Center. © The Dylan Thomas Trust.
See the full scope and contents of the physical Dylan Thomas Collection.
Poetry holdings of the Ransom Center
The Ransom Center’s poetry holdings span hundreds of years, a variety of poetic genres, and come from countries all around the world.
Twentieth-century poetry holdings include the work of Dylan Thomas, as well as Billy Collins, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Okigbo, Ezra Pound, Frederick Seidel, Anne Sexton, Edith Sitwell, James Tate, and Dara Wier, among others. The Center holds extensive collections of Beat Generation poets, including materials related to William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century archival materials shed light on the creative process of such poets as Edgar Allan Poe, Christina Rossetti, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. The Center also has extensive holdings by Romantic Poets and includes poetry by William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Wordsworth. In addition, the Center contains one of the largest collections of poetry related to the experience of war written by combatants and noncombatants alike, and includes the recent acquisition of The Dean Echenberg War Poetry Collection.
Learn more about Dylan Thomas, the digital collection launch and celebrate International Dylan Thomas Day
Discover Swansea University’s Richard Burton Archives, which holds the “lost” fifth notebook, working manuscripts of the poems Unluckily for a Death and Into Her Lying Down Head, and rare proof copies of several of Thomas’s works.
[Take a look at The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas: Annotated Manuscript Edition]
Its annual Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the most prestigious international awards for young writers, is awarded to the best published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or under. Learn more about last year’s winner Bryan Washington of Houston, Texas and the short list for this year’s prize to be awarded on May 13, the eve of International Dylan Thomas Day.
To view the 2021 award ceremony, please go to: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/dylan-thomas-prize/ and click ‘watch the ceremony’ (13th May, 7pm BST).
Discover the many landscapes that inspired Dylan Thomas.
To find out more about the digital collection, follow @ransomcenter on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or signup for email alerts. Learn more about the life and legacy of Dylan Thomas by visiting DiscoverDylanThomas.com, see all the activities planned for International Dylan Thomas Day, and even participate in the #LoveTheWords #DylanDay Poetry Share by creating and sharing your own poem.
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