UVA Scholar Wins Prestigious Art in Literature Award for Book on Trailblazing Librarian Belle da Costa Greene

University of Virginia professor Deborah Parker has been awarded the 2025 Mary Lynn Kotz Art in Literature Award for her book Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters. Presented by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the award honors outstanding literary works inspired by art and recognizes excellence in both creative and scholarly writing.

Parker, a professor of Italian in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, is the first UVA author to receive the Kotz Award. Her book explores the life and legacy of Belle da Costa Greene, the groundbreaking librarian who managed the private library of financier J. P. Morgan and navigated elite cultural circles in the early 20th century — all while concealing her racial identity in a segregated America.

Past recipients of the Kotz Award include Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, Virginia Poet Laureate Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, and Pulitzer Prize winners Erin Kelly and Winfred Rembert.

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene, Parker draws on Greene’s correspondence with art historian Bernard Berenson to illuminate the wit, ambition and unique presence in the art and literary worlds of the librarian who created one of the world’s most prestigious collections of rare books and manuscripts. The following excerpt offers a glimpse into Greene’s remarkable life.

Excerpt from Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters

Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) rose to great prominence as J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian. Glamorous and vivacious, the keenly intelligent Greene attracted admirers among her peers, artists, and journalists. By her death in 1950, the librarian whom Morgan once described as “the cleverest girl I know” had become a legendary figure in the art and book worlds.

Born in 1879, Greene was the daughter of two mixed-race Black Americans, Genevieve Fleet and Richard T. Greener—her father the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. When they separated in 1887, Genevieve Fleet assumed a Dutch middle name (Van Vliet), changed the family’s last name to Greene, and lived henceforth as white. Belle Marion Greener became Belle da Costa Greene—the “da Costa” a subtle claim to Portuguese ancestry.

Greene once quipped, “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.” Greene was not simply a librarian unlike any other, but unlike anyone. She was a librarian, book agent, curator, and the first director of the Morgan Library at a time when men occupied these positions; she was mixed race in a white world; she supported her mother and siblings; she earned $10,000 a year when other female librarians were earning $400. Her worlds encompassed Gilded Age mansions, aristocratic estates, rare book enclaves, auction houses, museums, and Greenwich Village galleries. Her position as the librarian of one of the world’s richest men was singular—and the way she inhabited it no less unique. Belle Greene was a category unto herself.

Greene had a voice: she wrote forcefully about the rarefied worlds in which she moved. In her letters to Bernard Berenson, the renowned art historian, we have a vivid account of her energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities and refined enthusiasms. Greene’s letters provide an unusually rich account of the way in which she projects and creates a self.

The letters are a treasure trove. What is there, provided by Greene’s account of her whirlwind social life and thoughts about it, is considerable—whom she adores or detests, what cultural and social events she attends, what books she’s reading and what collections she’s viewing, her accounts of her working life, her views of collectors, dealers and bookmen, and her portraits of her two bosses, Pierpont Morgan and his son J.P. Morgan Jr.

Greene didn’t just live life to the hilt—she forged the blade she wielded as Morgan’s librarian. Hers was a life lived large, but it was also writ large.