"Very dull" and "a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions"--so wrote a staff reader for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., the publisher who subsequently rejected the manuscript in question, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. In an essay for the New York Times entitled "No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov ," University of Texas at Austin history professor David Oshinsky surveys the Knopf archive housed at the university's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center . Within the collection's 1526 boxes of records dating from 1873 to 1996 are dismissive verdicts on works by Jorge Luis Borges, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Vladimir Nabokov. Click here to hear Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Associate Director Richard Oram speak with National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday about Knopf's decision to pass on Jack Kerouac's On the Road .