Smith Corona Manual Typewriter

1960

Centered on a wooden desk, in a room reserved solely for reading and writing, in an apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, this 1960s Smith Corona typewriter served as Sarah E. Wright’s primary tool of creativity. Wright used this sturdy instrument to craft her internationally acclaimed novel This Child’s Gonna Live (1969). The strike of each key on the manual keyboard brought Wright through the emotionally painstaking process of drafting a manuscript that was ten years in the making. The typewriter continued to facilitate her writing practices through the publication of numerous poems that followed her only novel.