Watch, Read, Listen

Wallace Stevens is regarded as one of the great American poets, yet he was also an inimitable letter writer. Leading international experts make the first concerted effort to study Stevens’ letters as a major part of the poet’s literary heritage.

Organized around themes defined by the verbs “Fight,” “Return,” “Map,” “Move,” and “Build,” the exhibition “Nineteen Nineteen” showcases items that embody an era in flux. Rare books, posters, letters, photographs, diaries, paintings, sculpture, and ephemera will be on view. Highlights include representative items from 1919, such as a 37-foot map of a Pacific Electric (Red Car) route in Los Angeles, astronomical photographs of the moon and constellations, German Revolution posters, and suffragist pamphlets, alongside important works acquired by Henry E. Huntington in the lead-up to that year, including the original manuscript of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, the journal of Aaron Burr, and the memoirs of Gen. William T. Sherman.

Award-winning author Susan Straight is joined by novelist Lisa See for a conversation about Straight’s powerful new memoir, In the Country of Women, which traces the lives of six generations of immigrant and multiracial women in her extended family. The program is presented by the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West. Book signing follows the program.