The exhibit, "Transcendentalists and Friends," will consist of selected items from the collection, which was acquired by the University from Myerson, former chair of the English department, under a multi-year gift-purchase arrangement.

"The library is pleased to announce this extraordinary addition to its American literature collection, the first recent substantial addition focussed on pre-20th century American writers," said Patrick Scott, associate university librarian for special collections.

"Announcing such a noteworthy acquisition in pre-1900 American literature for the library marks a great conclusion to the University's bicentennial," Scott added. Scott said, the collection, totaling more than 11,000 volumes, was conservatively appraised in 2000 at more than $750,000.

The collection was built up over a period of more than 30 years by Myerson, one of the leading scholars on the movement the collection represents. The Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature came to the University in 1971.

The materials include comprehensive collections of first editions for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, along with manuscripts, letters, proofs, later and posthumous editions, and associated scholarship.

With these core collections are smaller collections for lesser-known writers of the Transcendentalist movement, such as Christopher Pearse Cranch, significant groups of early editions from other writers of the period such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, and Harold Frederic, and a 7,000 volume reference collection of the scholarly publications about the period.

Myerson is the author or editor of some 60 books on 19th century American literature, from his early studies of Margaret Fuller, to such recent titles as Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), Whitman in His Own Time (2000), and The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols., 2001). He has published the standard scholarly bibliographical studies on each of the main authors he has collected; and he established and edited the major scholarly journal in the period, Studies on the American Renaissance (20 vols., 1977-1996).

For information on the collection or the exhibit, contact Scott at 7-3142.

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