Composing: Harry Mathews' Words & Worlds

Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was an American writer who divided his time between the United States and France. He composed an extraordinary range of literature: five novels (The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Cigarettes, and The Journalist), several collections of poetry, shorter fiction (collected in The Human Country, Dalkey Archive Press, 2001) and eclectic nonfiction (collected in The Case of the Persevering Maltese, Dalkey Archive Press, 2002). He did many translations from French, had written original literary works in French, and had written about and in conjunction with art and music. Mathews was also the creator of several works that defy simple classification. At the time of this exhibition, he was completing his book My Life in CIA. His final novel, The Solitary Twin, was published posthumously in early 2018.

The focus of the exhibit Composing is on how such an innovative writer actually put together his literary works. Two of the most hackneyed questions that one can pose to a writer are "Where do you get your ideas?" and "How do you write?" Mathews' drafts, notes, and letters provide fascinating material evidence of his writing techniques—some of which are ordinary, some of which are extremely unorthodox. The Penn Libraries' Harry Mathews papers, which includes the Locus Solus manuscripts as well as all of Mathews' typescripts and correspondence through the mid-1990s, helps to illuminate a variety of formal and informal techniques that Mathews used to explore new literary territory.