Harry Ransom, educator, academic administrator, scholar, and bookman, was associated with the University of Texas at Austin for most of his career. He is best known as the founder of the Humanities Research Center, of which he served as the guiding spirit from 1957 until the early 1970s; it was renamed the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in 1982. During this time he was in charge of a massive library-development effort, one of the largest and most costly of the century, which resulted in the spectacular growth of Texas's rare-book, manuscript, and other special collections. Ransom was the first institutional collector of twentieth-century literary materials on a large scale, and his acquisitions revolutionized the market for modern manuscripts.

Harry Huntt Ransom was born in Galveston, Texas, on 22 November 1908 to Harry Huntt Ransom, a high-school Latin teacher, and Marion Goodwin Ransom. After his father's death his mother moved the family to...