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A collection of letters and manuscripts of English and American authors, including one item from each of the following: Pearl S. Buck, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Frognall Dibden, Charles Dickens, William Ewart Gladstone, Edmund Gosse, Hester Thackeray Ritchie Fuller, Rockwell Kent, Charles Kingsley, Edward George Bulwer Lytton, John Masefield, Clinton Scollard, William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman. In addition, there are 8 letters from Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) to Mr. and Mrs. Horace Twiss (Annie Sterky Greenwood Twiss), photographs of Alan and Margaret Kempner and miscellaneous Kempner items.

The papers consist of correspondence, diaries, journals, interviews, manuscripts, transcripts, and printed material.

Correspondence, manuscripts, documents and a drawing concerning the De Quincey family of England, with members serving throughout the colonial world; the most famous was a prominent literary figure in England, Thomas De Quincey, best known for his "Confessions of an Opium-eater" (1821). There are letters from an uncle of his, Thomas Penson, who was serving in the Indian Army early in the century, to Thomas De Quincey. A son, Paul Frederick, served in the Army there later, and a Daughter, Florence, spent her married life in India. Another daughter, Margaret, married and was living in Macahʹe, Brazil, where her brother, Francis, was serving as a doctor until he died of the yellow fever. There are letters from her and associates of his at the time. Yet another man of that generation, Horace, died in China, of "the Remittant Fever of the Country" described to his sister Margaret by a colleague on his return to England. There is also some material about De Quincy himself, about his final illness, a drawing of his birthplace, and a document on the Norman origins of the Quincey family.

Correspondence, documents and manuscripts from late seventeenth and eighteenth century France, especially from the French Revolution, collected by Sam Schaefler. Authors include J.B. Colbert Torcy and the Duchesse Du Lude. Many of the items from the French Revolution represent the work of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. French Revolutionary leaders represented in the collection include François-Antoine Boissy D'Anglas, Jean-Baptiste-Noel Bouchotte, Pierre Joseph Cambon, Lazare Carnot, Jean-Marie Collot D'Herbois, l'Abbʹe de Fauchet, Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai, Jean Victor Moreau. C.A. Prieur-Duvernois, and Antoine Joseph Santerre. In addition, the collection includes a letter from the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted to Sir John Herschel, a letter by the French poet Romain Rolland, a document of the Philadelphia Artists' Fund Society of 1846 with signatures of its officers, and an autograph letter and a photograph of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.