LoC Blog: Finding “Something Wonderful” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Papers

For a lover of musical theater and the Great American Songbook, entering the quiet precincts of the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress is akin to sneaking into the cave of Ali Baba or King Tut’s tomb, a magical realm full of hidden treasures and unexpected gems. The weeks I spent there over the last three years, researching my new biography of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, were a golden time.
The Music Division is home to the manuscripts of George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Marvin Hamlisch and many others, including, of course, Richard Rodgers, and it also houses the vast bulk of the letters, papers, draft lyrics and libretti of Oscar Hammerstein. (Rodgers’ literary papers are mostly archived at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.)
The Library of Congress acquired the Oscar Hammerstein II Collection piecemeal after Hammerstein’s death from stomach cancer in 1960. In 2015, when I began my research, the papers had long been open to scholars, but had yet to be fully organized or processed. So my dogged digging through them was both a rare privilege and a special challenge.... [mehr] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/04/inquiring-minds-finding-something-wonderful-in-the-rodgers-and-hammerstein-papers/

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, 1959.