"The history of American literary scholarship is yet to be written, and the basic materials must be collected and preserved for the scholars who eventually will write it....  Future literary historians, biographers, and critics will want to know more about the writing, publishing, and reception of important books, and they will want to know more about changes in literary taste, fashion, and critical points of view."   

                                                                -Jay B. Hubbell

The Jay B. Hubbell Center was established at Duke University in 1976 with the mission to document the inception and continuing development of American literary studies. To this end, the Center collects and makes available for research the papers of scholars, critics, organizations, and projects related to the field of American literature. Examples of the kinds of materials housed at the Center include the organizational and editorial records of American Literature, the records of the American Literature Section of the MLA, the archives of the Cambridge History of American Literature, and the papers of scholars, including Gay Wilson Allen, Ralph Rusk, Louis Budd, Arlin Turner, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Cathy N. Davidson.

Few areas of scholarship have grown as rapidly as the field of American literature, which held a marginal position in colleges and universities as recently as the late 1920s. In the last seventy-five years, the discipline has played a key role in discussions about the production and interpretation of American culture. The holdings of the Hubbell Center record the history of the teaching of American literature, the changing shape of the canon, the development of the discipline, and shifts in the critical presuppositions behind literary studies. In the process, the collections reflect literature and literary criticism's role in generating ideas about nation, citizenship, region, race, gender, class, sexuality, subjectivity, technology, and everyday life.