Based on a recent patron request, we had this Super 8 film footage of Edward Dahlberg in September 1968 converted into a digital format. The footage is of Dahlberg and his editor, Harold Billings, along with Billings’s wife and their children.
Dahlberg was famous for writing books like Bottom Dogs, The Flea of Sodom, and The Sorrows of Priapus, his most successful book. He worked to promote human rights, speaking out against mistreatment of African Americans, Native Americans, Jewish people, immigrants, and workers, for which he was jailed multiple times.
This may be the only known footage of Dahlberg, who was an expatriat writer in Paris during the 1920s, and knew James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and many others whose papers and works we collect in Special Collections.
You can request to see more of the Edward Dahlberg collection and visit us on the 5th floor of McFarlin Library, Monday through Friday, 8am to 4:30pm.
