The aim of the 19th century private collectors who began the Harris Collection was to acquire all American and Canadian poetry, plays, and music, and this is still the guiding principle of the Collection today. It is the largest collectio n of Canadian poetry and drama outside Canada, and is much larger than collections in most Canadian research libraries.

The Collection includes a number of great rarities, of which the foremost is Marc Lescarbot's Les muses de la Nouvelle France, a masque performed in Nova Scotia in 1606 and published in Paris in 1609. This is no t only the earliest Canadian title, but the earliest title in the entire Harris Collection.

In addition, there are extensive collections of major French-Canadian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including: Anne Hebert, Francois-Xavier Garneau, Louis Frechette, Emile Nelligan, Gaston Miron, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Gratien Gelinas, Marcel Dube, Marie-Claire Blais, Michel Tremblay, Felix-Antoine Savard, Alain Grandbois, Roland Giguere, Gilles Vigneault, Nicole Brossard, among many others. Included in the Collection are extensive holdings of vocal music and hymnals, anthologies, and literary periodicals. There are also considerable holdings of Canadian poetry broadsides.

See Also:

Canadian Literature

The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University is an internationally renowned, constantly growing collection of primary historical sources pertaining to the Americas, both North and South, before ca. 1825. It includes an extensive collection of Canadiana.