By IAN CROUCH [The New York Review of Ideas] – In 1969, [Sean] Shesgreen and several colleagues interrupted a Modern Language Association conference in New York to protest the organization’s apolitical stance on the Vietnam War. The protests temporarily closed down the conference, and Shesgreen was arrested along with two confederates.

“I spent the night in the Tombs of New York,” he recalls, laughing. “As a result of our protest the hotel was shut down, and I think it did move the MLA to become more politically active.”

Despite his agitator past, Shesgreen says he intended merely to write a conventional history of the Norton [Anthology of English Literature]. He had long been interested in the list of editors on the Norton’s title page. How were these people chosen? And what effect did they have on the study of British literature? He began collecting every edition, including the first. That list of editors contained no women and was packed with what he calls “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants exclusively from elite universities.” Shesgreen wanted to know how these original editors influenced the content of later editions: what had changed and what remained the same?

In, 2003, at the encouragement of then Norton general editor M.H. Abrams, Shesgreen traveled to Cornell to examine materials relating to the construction of the original anthology from 1962, including Abrams’ original notes and personal correspondences. What he found did not amount to much.

“He didn’t look at his files before I came out to see if the material I was looking for was there,” Shesgreen says. “When I got there I found exactly three letters covering the beginning of the Norton.” He feared his trip had been a waste of time.

Near the end of his stay, however, Abrams gave Shesgreen a folder that he had just recently found. Shesgreen’s eyes went wide at what he found inside: a series of e-mails from 1998 exchanged between the anthology’s editors and Norton executives in New York. Shesgreen saw an organization obsessed with the threat posed by the new Longman Anthology of British Literature, and used what he terms “cutthroat tactics” in his article to undermine the competition.

As discreetly as he could, he rushed to the photocopier before catching his flight back to Illinois.

Continued at The New York Review of Ideas | More Chronicle & Notices.