The Kenneth Burke Papers
Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) was a rhetorician whose criticism and theories had a major impact on many American writers and thinkers in the mid-twentieth century. A prominent intellectual in New York literary circles beginning in the 1920s, Burke was a poet, essayist, reviewer, novelist, translator, social commentator, and writer of short stories. His ever-fertile writings, collected in more than fifteen books, have made his name a byword in literary theory, history, economics, linguistics, dramaturgy, rhetoric, and much else. He was one of the founders a half-century ago of what was then called the New Criticism in America. But Burke was more widely known in scholarly circles as a philosopher of language; he concentrated on the true meaning and significance of the deeper uses to which language may be put.
Burke's many books--including Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, Language as Symbolic Action, On Symbols and Society, Permanence and Change, The Rhetoric of Religion--have had an extraordinary influence on a multitude of disciplines. Burke was friend and confidante, inspiration and motivator, of a star assemblage of twentieth-century American figures. The intimate nature of his correspondence and the level of interchange that Burke customarily elicits from his correspondents reveal his powers of friendship and intellect.
The largest collection of letters is the exchange between Burke and Malcolm Cowley, who were mutually gifted with strong constitutions and tireless typewriters; their correspondence, begun in 1916 when they were high-school chums in Pittsburgh, continued for seventy-eight years and ended only with Cowley's death in 1989. After the unique Cowley-Burke file, the second outstanding collection is the correspondence with William Carlos Williams, who for forty-two years wrote to Burke as editor, poet, friend, and physician. Williams wrote several times a week, often sending along poems for Burke's reactions and comments.
The University Libraries purchased the bulk of Kenneth Burke's papers from Burke in 1974. The collection is primarily a correspondence file of letters written to Burke through 1961. Included in the papers are letters from Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Katherine Anne Porter, Theodore Roethke, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Howard Nemerov, and Marianne Moore.
The files consist of both family and professional correspondence. A letter written by "Master Kenneth Burke" to "Dear Mom and Lewis" on 8 August 1906 is the earliest of nearly 1,100 notes and letters (original and carbons) by Burke himself. Also of interest are the tiny, spider-like summaries in margins or on the versos of letters, where he used to work out his replies.
Rare Books and Manuscripts also has on deposit much of Burke's later correspondence (including many carbon copies of Burke's own letters), written from approximately 1959 until his death in 1993. Title for these materials is in the process of passing to the Pennsylvania State University Libraries.
The collection is arranged chronologically, and a card index is available to researchers. All requests for permission to quote from Burke's letters will be referred to the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust, which retains copyright, for formal permission to publish.
Kenneth Burke at the dedication of his bust in 1991.
Sculpture by Virginia Burks; photo by Richard Ackley.
The Bust of Burke
A bronze bust of Kenneth Burke was a gift in 1991 to the University Libraries from Virginia and Don Burks and Marion and George Molnar. Virginia Burks, the sculptor and a personal friend of Burke, worked from life to fashion an extraordinary portrait that captures his protean energy and vitality. The title plaque includes Burke's choice of words: ad bellum purificandum ("towards the purification of war") which is the motto of Burke's book A Grammar of Motives and a goal of all of his works. After Burke's death in 1993 at the age of ninety-six, the sculptor added the death date and the Latin inscription nostrae dies mortis, meaning "day of our death," to the base of the bust.
Kenneth Burke's words and personality are rather more linked than many had the opportunity to observe when he was alive. Perhaps this monumental bust of his great head--at once impish, friendly, and demonic--may help to bridge the gap between the man and his ideas. We are happy to have it installed in the Rare Books Room, near Burke's correspondence.
