English and American Literature in Library Special Collections

LSC is committed to remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. We aim to:

• Be clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know
• Embrace baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials
• Demonstrate an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor

Read more about our past and current approaches to description in Toward Ethical and Inclusive Descriptive Practices in UCLA Library Special Collections.

Library Special Collections holdings include a wide variety of literary rare books, as well as manuscripts and archival collections relating to specific authors and poets.  While materials representing a broad spectrum of periods and genres may be found, the principal collecting areas are nineteenth and twentieth-century English and American literature.

Quick tips

• Visit UC Library Search to search by author, title, or keyword.  If you have too many search results, try more specific search terms or limiting your search by date to find a specific edition. 
• Search the Online Archive of California (OAC) for archival material, such as the papers of John Fante or Susan Sontag.
• Significant literature holdings can also be found at our affiliated library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, with particular strengths in English literature and history (1641-1800), Oscar Wilde, and fine printing. Clark materials are also discoverable in UC Library Search.