Carlton Lake: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center


Descriptive Summary
	Creator:	Lake, Carlton
	Title:	Carlton Lake Collection of French Manuscripts
	Dates	1377-2000, undated
	Abstract:	For over six decades, Carlton Lake acquired approximately 350,000 French literary materials, including manuscripts, photographs, works of art, broadsides, galleys, musical scores, and others. The majority of the papers represent French writers, musicians, and artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, though included are earlier materials, such as letters from the era of Napoleon. While the majority of the materials are written in the French language, English, German, Russian, and Spanish language materials also appear.
	RLIN record #:	TXRC06-A21
	Extent:	303 document boxes, 25 oversize boxes, 16 bound volumes, 5 galley folders, 96 oversized folders (127.26 linear feet)
	Note:	We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which provided funds for the processing and cataloging of this collection.
	Repository	The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Biographical Sketch

Over a period of six decades, Carlton Lake gathered together what has become the most extensive collection of modern French literary research materials anywhere outside of Paris. He collected books, photographs, artwork, and other original documents in addition to manuscripts, covers a broad range of French writers, artists, and musicians, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Albert Camus, Céline, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Debussy, Marcel Duchamp, André Gide, Alfred Jarry, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Ravel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erik Satie, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Valéry.

Carlton Lake was born in Brockton, Massachusetts on September 7, 1915. He attended Boston University and graduated summa cum laude in 1936, and in 1937 received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. After the war, he pursued his doctorate at New York University, but ultimately abandoned his dissertation to become a freelance writer.

From 1950 to 1965 he was Paris art critic for The Christian Science Monitor. He also contributed to a number of other American and European periodicals, such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Town and Country, and The Atlantic Monthly,which published his interviews with such artists as Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Henry Moore, and Giacometti. Lake also co-edited A Dictionary of Modern Painting in 1956 and wrote, edited, and translated books about Marc Chagall, Picasso, and Salvador Dali.

Carlton Lake came to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in 1968, ultimately serving as Curator of the French Collection, Acting Director, and Executive Curator. His impressive collection of French materials was added to the Ransom Center collections in the late 1960s. In 1976, the collection was the subject of a major exhibition, Baudelaire to Beckett, which focused international scholarly attention on its strong manuscript resources, which number approximately 350,000 pieces in all. Since then, other significant exhibitions based on Carlton Lake Collection material have been devoted to Samuel Beckett (1984) and Henri Pierre Roché (1991). In addition, art and literary materials from the Collection have been loaned to many French, European, and American exhibitions held by such institutions as the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Grolier Club, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Lake Collection has also been a principal source for two literary exhibitions held at the Centre Pompidou: Paris -New York, and Les Réalismes.

In 1985 he was decorated by the French government and inducted into L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres with the rank of Chevalier; later he became an Officier. In 1990, he published his memoirs, Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist, detailing his adventures purchasing and collecting French literary materials. In 2003, Lake retired from the Ransom Center with the title of Executive Curator Emeritus. Lake died on May 5, 2006 at the age of ninety.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Carlton Lake:

An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

Arrangement

Access:

Fèvre, Henri

Laforgue, Jules