Literature

Many of us, alongside reading poetry and novels or travel narratives, want to know about the context in which the author lived. Who were their families? Did they have a specific person of whom they dreamed when they wrote about love? Understanding the author can give us a better understanding of their meaning, their focus, and their world.

Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend starting with what other scholars have written. If those books don’t exist, or I am after a deeper understanding, I would start looking into what I could sketch out about the author and then look for unpublished papers in archival collections or other repositories using search interfaces such as ArchiveGrid or ArchiveFinder.

The Case Study: Angelina Weld Grimké

For the purposes of this exploration, I’m going to look at one of my many favorite poets: Angelina Weld Grimké (Wikipedia). This poet, born in 1880 in Boston, wrote poignant poems about life and love, many of which were published in the 1910s. They died in 1958 in New York City.

Based on that information, I expect Grimké to have possibly written and received letters to and from family and publishers; to maybe have kept account books or diaries; and possibly to appear in or have created family papers.

There are other kinds of sources that might exist for our purposes as well, but I’m sticking to these for now.

Looking for Unpublished Materials

Unpublished material such as letters is usually held by archives; historical societies/museums; estates; or family/friends. The latter two can be a harder reach, but the first two usually try to let researchers know what they hold. With that aim, many archives upload their finding aids (here’s information from Bancroft Library about what a finding aid is) into collective search interfaces like ArchiveGrid and ArchiveFinder. To find additional ways to search archival collections, take a look at the Library Resource Guide History: Locating Archives.

To use either of those two databases, I usually recommend writing out a list of possible permutations of the person’s name. “Angelina Weld Grimké” might written as such, but it also might appear as:

• Angelina Grimké
• Angelina Weld Grimke
• Angelina Grimke

Some English language search interfaces are designed to ignore accents, and some will fail a search if the characters in a name do not precisely mirror whatever a finding aid says.

Searching ArchiveGrid

OCLC runs this platform and, as far as library search interfaces go, I like it well enough. Do be aware that it sits behind a paywall and you must be logged in with your institution to use it.

Once I have the initial search page up, I usually start my search with the full, formal name; in this case (Angelina Weld Grimké) without quotation marks and with the accent over the “e.”
In this case, I got two results, one of which was the “Weld-Grimké family papers.” When I use the link to the University of Michigan’s finding aid, however, I find out that the collection, substantial at 14 linear feet, focuses on Angelina Weld Grimké’s grandparents, one of whom was abolitionist Angelina Grimké.

The second result, relating to scholar and poet Akasha Hull, is actually more on point as Hull wrote about Angelina Weld Grimké. Based on the collection listed in New York Public Library’s finding aid, however, material about Angelina Weld Grimké is likely to be sparse as the “Scope and arrangement” section note that the collection covers a significant number of topics and the “Detailed description” only mentions Grimké once.
At this point, I ran the other permutations of the name and didn’t get any other relevant collections. So, I move on to the next resource.

Using ArchiveFinder

ProQuest runs ArchiveFinder and I am not a big fan of their interface, largely because of the layout. The point and goal of the interface is much the same, but different archives/repositories subscribe and use different interfaces, which means I need to search both for a wider results list.

So, I start with the same name and search for (Angelina Weld Grimké).

The results here are much more directly on topic. I still get the Michigan result for the Weld family papers at the top. The following results, however, are new and include a collection called “Grimké, Angelina Weld” AND “Angelina Weld Grimké papers, 1887-1958” both at Howard. A few of the other collections, including Fisk University’s “Negro collection” appear to hold potentially interesting information.

Reading a Relevant Finding Aid

In deciding which collections to focus on, I read the associated finding aids, focusing first on description and size. For Howard’s “Grimké, Angelina Weld” (finding aid) is 8 linear feet and includes drafts as well as published material.

Given the highly-relevant description, I then skim the rest of the finding aid, which includes folder and box level description. That means Howard hasn’t recorded information about every piece of information in the box, but you can get a great sense of what’s there. For example, the description for Box 38, folder 15:

Series F Notebooks Box 38-15 French vocabulary exercises, writings of prose and poetry, and recipes

suggests that it contains some poetry along with other types of material. That might not give a clear sense of what poetry is in there or how it’s presented, but something of interest is there! Or, I think it will be. My personal, vague, castle-in-the-sky hope is that there will be poems about food scrawled on whatever recipe information is there.

If there are only one or two papers that are of interest, then I’d likely check the archive’s information about rights and reproductions. If they have options for digital copies, I might request the page or two.

In this case, there are hundreds of items associated with the collection. Most archives won’t copy that number of pages for staff and resource reasons. In consequence,
I would consider a visit to the archive and read their informational pages on the subject. In this case, Howard’s Moorland-Springarn Research Center page on the subject suggests writing to them before making a research appointment.

Additional Steps

There are several additional approaches to finding additional material about an author. For Grimké, I’d head to historical newspaper sets such as the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America.

I would also take a look for government records in Ancestry.com (public libraries often have subscriptions, for Berkeley see here), the National Records and Archives Association, as well as check historical association centers around where Grimké was born, lived, and died.

There is a lot one can do to find information. Whether one wants to take those steps often depends on your time, funding, and how relevant the information is to your research.

If I’m focused on one author, then I’d likely try to find out what’s out there. If I’m looking for 100 people, I wouldn’t do in-depth research into each but focus on specific types of information.

Let your literature librarian know if you’d like to talk about research strategies for you.