Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read

The Story of PEN

November 2, 2024 – August 17, 2025

Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read: The Story of PEN explores the history of PEN and its continuing relevance as an international organization focused on freedom of expression. Using the archive of both English PEN and PEN International at the Harry Ransom Center, this exhibition follows the founding of the organization of P.E.N. (poets, essayists, and novelists) as a dining club in London in 1921, its fight against the Nazi book burning campaigns in the 1930s, and its present status as the world's foremost association of writers, operating in more than 90 countries. This exhibition spotlights creators like Radclyffe Hall, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood alongside the everyday people who promote freedom of expression.

This exhibition is curated by Professor Marion Wynne-Davies, University of Surrey.

• PEN Teaching Guides

  The PEN Teaching Guides contain materials for the use of instructors to support teaching on human rights, politics, literature, and cultural history. These materials include manuscripts, drafts, clippings, correspondence, official publications, books, posters, video recordings, and additional items from the PEN Digital Collection and related collections held at the Harry Ransom Center.

  These guides are designed to allow students to engage not only with evolving conversations surrounding human rights and free speech in the twentieth century, but also with landmark events and broad historical trends, from the rise of fascism in the interwar years, through the intensification of the Cold War, and into the era following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s and 1990s.

  For further information on teaching or scheduling classes in the Harry Ransom Center, visit Classroom Experiences.

• PEN Digital Collection

  The PEN Digital Collection contains 3,500 images of newsletters, minutes, reports, scrapbooks, and ephemera selected from the PEN Records. To further enhance research, the English PEN newsletters (1927-1964) and minutes (1931-1970) have undergone OCR conversion to create full-text searchable documents, enabling users to locate names, events, and topics in their original chronological contexts and use that information much like an index into the rest of the archive.

  An additional 900 images selected from the PEN Records and related Ransom Center collections now form five PEN Teaching Guides. These guides have been developed to provide resources to instructors interested in teaching with PEN materials and to offer students the opportunity to engage with archival resources to enrich their learning experience. These guides highlight PEN's interactions with major political and historical trends across the twentieth century, exploring the organization's negotiation with questions surrounding free speech, political displacement, and human rights, and with global conflicts like World War II and the Cold War.