The Collections: Guide to the Collections: Indiana Literature
Resources
Indiana Literature -- Related Manuscript Collections
Exhibition catalogues that survey the collection include:
![Lew Wallace. Ben Hur, first edition [Harper and Brothers, 1880].](../../images/benhur1.jpg)
In the fifty-year period that followed the publication of Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School Master in 1871, Indiana authors ranked second only to those of New York in publishing best-sellers. It was with the writers of the "golden age" of Indiana literature, including Eggleston, Lew Wallace, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington, George Barr McCutcheon, Gene Stratton Porter, Kin Hubbard, George Ade, and James Whitcomb Riley, that J. K. Lilly, Jr. began his book collection and it is his books that form the nucleus of the Library's holdings. Several of these authors, particularly Eggleston, Wallace, and Riley, also are represented by manuscripts and/or correspondence. Earlier Indiana authors, such as Robert Dale Owen, Solon Robinson, Sarah T. Bolton and Joseph S. Welsh, as well as later ones such as Theodore Dreiser, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Ernie Pyle, and Kurt Vonnegut are well represented in the Lilly Library's collections.
To purchase exhibition catalogues, see information on the Lilly Library's Publications. To search the Library's catalog and other finding aids, see the Collections page.
Top: Lew Wallace. Ben Hur, first edition [Harper and Brothers, 1880].
