Founded in 1971, Resources for American Literary Study soon became a favored venue for archival scholarship and bibliographical analysis in American literature. Recent issues have featured unpublished letters from F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Bret Harte, Edith Wharton, Alice James, Willa Cather, and Nathanael West; analyses of manuscripts by Thoreau, Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill; checklists of letters by John Cheever; a "Prospects" section with expert recommendations for the future study of authors ranging from Poe to Malamud. Book reviews are also prominent feature in every volume.

RALS became a clothbound annual with volume 28 and is published by AMS Press. Everything else that has made the journal a force in literary study for the past thirty years is in place.