Donald Clifford Gallup

Background

Donald Gallup was born on May 12, 1913, in Sterling, Connecticut, the United States.

Education

Gallup received a scholarship to Yale University and received a bachelor's degree in 1934 and a Ph. D. in 1939.

Career

Gallup served in the army from 1941 to 1946 and used the time in Europe to acquire first editions of poetry and classic works. While in Paris he met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and his friendship with Stein resulted in his acquiring her works for the Yale Library.

He helped compile, with Robert Bartlett Haas, A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. Other books by Gallup include T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Collaborators in Letters, and Work Diary. Gallup also edited numerous books and contributed articles to the Times Literary Supplement and Yale Review.

His last book, published in 1988, was Pigeons on the Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian. At one point Gallup was named the literary executor of Thornton Wilder’s works and edited Wilder’s Collected Plays and Journals. He said that the honor of editing the work was enough, and donated a $25,000 bequest from Wilder to the Yale library. Gallup spent most of his career as a curator in the Yale Collection of American Literature.

Achievements

• Gallup was crucial to the emerging reputation of Yale as a force in modern writing, having published a catalog of Eliot's first editions, which were exhibited at Yale in 1937. That early catalog formed the basis for a more detailed Eliot checklist in 1947, and for Gallup's full-scale bibliography of Eliot, published in 1952.

Works

More photos

• book

  • T.S. Eliot; a bibliography 1953
  • What Mad Pursuits! More Memories of a Yale Librarian 1998
  • Pigeons on the Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian 1988
  • On Contemporary Bibliography 1970
  • T.S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters 1970
  • Eugene O`Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle 1998
  • The Flowers of Friendship 1953
  • Plays Modelled on the Noh 1987
  • The lost manuscripts of T.S. Eliot 1968

Personality

Gallop's earliest literary passion was as a collector; while still a graduate student, he spent his spare money purchasing Eliot's early, and, on London trips, began collecting the sketches and paintings of Edward Lear. Back in wartime Britain with the US army, he continued to acquire first editions and rare titles by British writers.

In 1997, Gallup donated his $1m collection of Lear materials, which included seven oils and more than 300 drawings, to Yale's British art center. Later, he donated a 13-shelf foot collection of the works of Lawrence Durrell.

Interests

• Writers

  T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound

• Artists

  Edward Lear

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001