The research Hoover conducted during her busy internship took her from the stately halls of East College, home to the English department, through the generous collection at Dickinson’s library and on to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, where she stopped long enough for a photo.

I always suspected that experiential variety might be important in life. So in contrast to last summer’s employment as a waitress at an all-night diner, this year I acquired a more riveting position as a research assistant in the English department. I had the opportunity to participate in a project unusual at the undergraduate level—a chance to further my own interest in an author by assisting in research for a book.

As Professor Wendy Moffat’s intern, I helped her undertake oral histories and archival research for her book on E. M. Forster, and I gained a better understanding of what a project of this size entails.

I was given a dog-eared copy of Howards End during my freshman year, and I became deeply interested in Forster’s use of narrative voice as a method to depict various domestic tragedies. Then, during my junior year at the University of East Anglia, England, I spent a semester making weekly trips down to the Kings College archives at Cambridge where I was granted permission to gawk at Forster’s letters and manuscripts as part of an independent research project. Consequently, working with Professor Moffat this summer on a chapter of her book was an ideal opportunity.

We began by using Forster’s unpublished journals as a rubric to study his trips to America in 1947 and 1949, a subject that up until now has received little attention. The journals offered vague outlines of things we knew, and they prompted numerous questions regarding aspects of his trips that were unknown.

My first tasks in the effort to gather information about Forster were letter writing, setting up interviews and locating resources. I’m not sure Samuel Johnson was entirely correct when he concluded that a man would “turn over half a library just to write one book,” but I suspect we turned over several libraries during the summer. And while published resources have been crucial to this project, it has been the outside sources, in some ways, that have proved most important.

For example, at the end of June, Professor Moffat and I took a research trip. We conducted several interviews and examined correspondence in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library. Many of the threads that connected the material came together through these experiences. A grave inscribed with a personal quote and a picture of Forster resting peacefully with a cat named Hamish were just a few reminders that sometimes what is most worth writing about is not yet found in a book.

Over the course of this summer I learned that literary research is the product of interactive discourse. And I found that writing is a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You can jam the pieces together anyway you please, but only the correct assembly will offer a cohesive picture. This fall I hope to pursue research on the material while integrating this information into my senior thesis. The opportunity to study a single author in such depth has been a significant experience.