“Hollywood, as I predicted, is not a nice place to go out in.” So wrote Orson Welles upon moving from New York to Los Angeles in 1939. Welles’ original correspondence to his first wife is part of a recent acquisition by the University’s Special Collections Library. U-M is now home to the most extensive international archive on the filmmaker, actor, director, and writer, who is perhaps best known for the movie Citizen Kane.

Related: View a Slideshow of Images from the Collection

Related: The War of the Worlds Letters: Orson Welles, Fake News, and American Democracy in the Golden Age of Radio

The University’s Board of Regents in September approved the renaming of the art-and-design school to the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design.

On a frigid Moscow night, William Revelli and the Michigan Symphony Band launched one of the most ambitious cultural exchanges in history. The year was 1961.

Video: The video game developer who created Sid Meier’s Civilization and Sid Meier’s Pirates recently took a turn creating future game developers. Meier, an engineering alum, led a game design boot camp at Michigan that attracted fellow engineers competing for the title of the next Sid Meier.

In the 1960s the title of hippest town in the Midwest most certainly belonged to Ann Arbor, home to a vibrant music scene and a host of hip clubs. Among the very hippest was a small converted print shop called Canterbury House.

Award-winning filmmaker Gary Gilbert, ’86, is a dreamer. But he’s also a hard-working realist. “Growing up, people would tell me a career in Hollywood was a pipe dream,” says the former mortgage broker. “But I can tell you it’s not.” Gilbert produced The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening.

Legendary reporter helped shape TV journalism; launched his career at U-M.

Anthropologist John Mitani consults on Disneynature film Chimpanzee.

Eileen Pollack’s new novel, “Breaking and Entering,” is a story of love, economic dislocation, and political extremism set in a rural Michigan that’s close to everyone’s home.