In the 1950s, Vanderbilt University English professor Walter Sullivan (1924-2006) founded Vanderbilt’s Literary Symposia (a precursor to the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series), which invited famous writers to speak on campus. These reel-to-reel tapes include recordings of Symposia lectures, panels, readings, and interviews by some of the twentieth century’s most significant literary figures, including James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Spencer, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Richard Wilbur, and August Wilson.