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Widener Library
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===Death of Harry Widener=== {{main|Harry Elkins Widener}} [[File:HarryElkinsWidener YearbookPhoto cropped.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.5 |link=File:HarryElkinsWidener_YearbookPhoto.jpg |[[Harry Widener]] died in the sinking of the ''[[Titanic]]''.]] [[File:HarvardUniversity GoreHall RemovingBooks c1912.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.0|Two electric trucks removed [[Gore Hall]]'s books for storage during Widener's construction.{{r|gazette2012A}}]] On April 15, 1912, [[Harry Elkins Widener]]{{mdashb}}scion of two of the wealthiest families in America,{{r|dies_paris}} a 1907 graduate of [[Harvard College]], and an accomplished [[book collecting|bibliophile]] despite his youth{{r|newton}}{{mdashb}}died in the [[sinking of the Titanic|sinking of the ''Titanic'']]. His father [[George Dunton Widener]] also perished, but his mother [[Eleanor Elkins Widener]] survived.{{r|dies_paris}} Harry Widener's will instructed that his mother, when "in her judgment [[Harvard University]] shall make arrange{{shy}}ments for properly caring for my collec{{shy}}tion of books{{nbsp}}... shall give them to said University to be known as the Harry Elkins Widener Collection",{{NoteTag| {{r|HEW_will}} Stipulations on conditions of storage began to appear in bequests to Harvard's libraries during the nineteenth century.{{r|burke}} For example, the 1883β84 annual report of [[Harvard Divinity School]]'s dean noted that [[Ezra Abbot]]{{'}}s widow, in donating four thousand volumes from his personal library, asked for assurance that a better and safer replacement for the existing Divinity School library building be constructed promptly; the dean also wrote that such a replacement would encourage future donors.{{r|divinity}} }}<!--<<end efn--> and he had told a friend, not long before he died, "I want to be remembered in connection with a great library, [but] I do not see how it is going to be brought about."{{hsp}}{{r|newton}} To enable the fulfillment of her son's wishes Eleanor Widener briefly consid{{shy}}ered funding an addition to Gore Hall, but soon determined to build instead a completely new and far larger library building{{mdashb}}"a perpetual memorial"{{hsp}}{{r|canoe|p=90}} to Harry Widener, housing not only his personal book collection but Harvard's general library as well,{{r|gift}} with room for growth.{{r|Harvard's_new}} As Biel has written, "The [Harvard architects] committee's [[Beaux-Arts architecture|Beaux Arts]] design [for Gore Hall's projected replacement], with its massiveness and symmetry, offered monumen{{shy}}tal{{shy}}ity with nothing more particular to monumen{{shy}}tal{{shy}}ize than the aspira{{shy}}tions of the modern university"{{mdashb}}until the ''Titanic'' sank and "through delicate negotia{{shy}}tion, [Harvard] convinced Eleanor Widener that the most eloquent tribute to Harry would be an entire library rather than a rare book wing."{{hsp}}{{r|canoe|p=88-89}}
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