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The Literary History of the Word Processor
In December 2011 I was delighted to be present as Seamus Heaney officially handed his literary archive to the National Museum, and wondered at the time, what might be the position in twenty years time if (and when) we have a writer of equal world note, handing his or her literary archive to the nation – would it all be on a hard drive? Printed papers with hand written annotations (do you keep your draft copies?!)? Or a pile of discs or USB keys?
As someone who spends a huge amount of time hunched over a computer, I thought this was an interesting article from the New York Times (and thank goodness today, we don’t have to write on a computer with a monitor only showing white or green type on black!) – how times have changed…
The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: December 25, 2011
The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Photo credit : Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a professor of English, asks,
“Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?”
The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time.
Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s…
Read the full item here:
