Rent Composer Gets His Posthumous Due

The U.S. Library of Congress has inducted the personal archive of late Rent composer Jonathan Larson into its collection. (Larson, whose rock musical is one of the most successful new shows of the last two decades, died of an aneurysm shortly before the show’s Broadway premiere in 1996.) Larson is “the first of a younger cadre of Broadway songwriters to have his manuscripts, letters and other materials preserved at the library alongside those of Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein.”