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April 13 would have been playwright Lanford Wilson's 77th birthday, so we're celebrating him by featuring his work on this week's Manuscript Monday. Wilson passed away in 2011 and left his papers to the University of Missouri Libraries. The collection includes correspondence, working notebooks, drafts and proof copies, and well as work related to Wilson's personal interests, such as gardening and art collecting.

The manuscripts featured here relate to Wilson's plays A Sense of Place and Fifth of July, which was recently produced on campus by the MU Theatre Department. It's fascinating to watch Wilson at work through these pages, as he adds, edits and deletes the texts of his plays.

An unexpected bonus: we also found Wilson's recipe for tomato tart, which sounds delicious. Let us know if you try it!

These are selections from Wild Pilgrimage (1932), a wordless novel by Lynd Ward. In this novel, Ward manages two plot threads by color-coding them. The real world is represented in black-and-white woodcuts, while the main character’s inner life is depicted in red and white. Ward's books deal with the role of the individual in society, the identity of the artist, and the hardships and exploitation suffered by the working classes. Ward worked primarily in wood engraving, which allowed for a refined line and detail. His style combines the emotive elements of Expressionism with the monumental, muscular figures of Art Deco. Ward varies the use of space and even the dimensions of his images, providing the reader with a changing experience as pages are turned.

MERLIN catalog record

Monday Manuscript: Notebooks from a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

Wild Pilgrimage, Lynd Ward’s 1930s graphic novel

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