New Morgan Exhibition Explores the History of Storytelling

Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling is running at The Morgan Library & Museum focusing on the rich history of storytelling through 140 literary works and other objects from its own collection alongside loans. 

On view through May 3, it highlights a variety of narratives from the Babylonian, which is among the earliest literary works preserved in written form, to works by writers and artists inspired by New York City, featuring printed books, manuscripts, films, artifacts, comics, drawings, paintings, and photographs.

Highlights include:

• a tablet Inscribed in Akkadian with a fragment of the Babylonian flood story from the Epic of Atrahasis, Mesopotamia, dating from the First Dynasty of Babylon and the reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–26 BC)
• a heavily annotated page of James Joyce’s Ulysses
• Jean de Brunhoff’s earliest drawings of Babar
• a woodcut-illustrated edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, printed around 1483 by William Caxton
• Maurice Sendak's 1979 storyboard for Where the Wild Things Are opera in watercolor, pen and ink, and graphite pencil
• Henry David Thoreau’s journals and Édouard Manet’s only surviving notebook