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Reviews, essays, and draft material for Howard's uncollected criticism, including Howard's foreword for the 1990 reissue of Mrs. Dalloway and introductory material for Howard's 1977 collection Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century. Of particular note are 14 handwritten notebooks including research for essays, interviews, and lecture material. The materials are arranged alphabetically.

This series contains correspondence, notes, and teaching material from Howard's time as a visitng professor at Columbia and Yale, as well as notes on various political causes that she supported during this period. Of particular interest are a set of handwritten journal entries, dated 1964, that provide insight to the beginning of her novelistic career. The materials are arranged alphabetically.

Series IV contains correspondence, interview transcripts, clippings, and audio and video recordings from Darcus Howe's career in journalism. There are some drafts and clippings of Howe's newspaper columns, including "Thinking Aloud," his weekly column in Trinidad and Tobago's Sunday Mirror. The bulk of this series is composed of videotapes of Howe's television work for Channel Four dating from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. These include the Bandung File, a series Howe co-produced with Tariq Ali between 1985 and 1991, and other programs co-produced by Ali and Howe through their Bandung Productions company. Bandung File and Bandung Productions materials are located in Subseries IV.2. Howe's other television work is located in Subseries IV.3. This includes video tapes of Howe's series Devil's Advocate (1992-1996) and his appearances on Live and Direct and The London Programme. There are also audiotapes of interviews, research material, and other paper and audiovisual material used in Howe's television and radio work.

Series III includes material associated with the Race Today Collective and its successor organization, the C. L. R. James Institute. Documentation of the Race Today Collective's activities includes bylaws and budget information from circa 1978, audiotapes of Collective meetings and literature study sessions from the late 1980s, and some Race Today editorial correspondence. The latter comprises primarily reprinting permissions and letters to the editor, as well as routine correspondence related to secretarial work and some general discussion of political issues in Trinidad and Tobago and other former British colonies in the Caribbean and Africa. There is a full run of the journal Race Today and a small number of Race Today Publications monographs. A comparatively large group of material related to the United States' 1983 invasion of Grenada includes diaries kept by Race Today Collective member Gus John and a person called Christine in Carriacou documenting the situation in Grenada. This series also contains four folders of Darcus Howe Action Committee material. Finally, there is material related to the Collective's 1991 dissolution and reconstitution as the C. L. R. James Institute, circa 1991-1996. These include meeting minutes, plans and applications for charity status, and even architectural drawings of a proposed cultural center and cafe. The relationship between this C. L. R. James Institute and the one founded in New York City in 1984—if any—is unclear.

A set of published annual facebooks containing images and information for individuals entering the Graduate School of Journalism.

By examining these typescripts in relation to the published pieces--both the Dialogue and the Journal article--we get a close look at Griffin's method. The Correspondence from this period--between Griffin and Fr. Thompson; between Griffin and Ramparts editor/publisher Ed Keating; between Griffin and Bishop Greco (Fr Thompson's superior); as well as the correspondences of the priest and the bishop (and both of these men with Keating of Ramparts)--document an interesting struggle that all experienced. Bishop Greco tried to block the interview on the grounds that Fr. Thompson's documented experience of racism by the Church would not be good for the Church. Eventually, the interview ran, setting off a controversy that reached beyond Bishop Greco's diocese to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the US during the 1960s.

Subtitled A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton, this 231 page published book charts Griffin's 18 visits to Merton's hermitage, from August 5, 1969 through June 15, 1972 (plus three other entries made at his home in Fort Worth, Texas). The edition includes a short preface by Griffin--his last piece of writing composed for publication--and a folio of his photographs of the hermitage and its surroundings. The cloth edition was published by Andrews and McMeel in 1981, the year after Griffin's death; a paperback version appeared a few years later under Doubleday's Image imprint.. Like Black Like Me, this book is a diary set apart from Griffin's ongoing Journal (1950-1980), and was intended as a self-contained work for publication. The scholar will not find either text in the overall pagination of the Journal, even though there are other entries for the years (in which these two books were composed) in that larger 3,000 page compendium. Nonetheless, if one were to read the two published diaries and the Journal chronologically, the overall story of Griffin's life-line continues uninterrupted from 1950 to 1980.. In the case of The Hermitage Journals, the text was first drafted as a diary from 1969-1972. That draft was edited and a second draft was made in 1978-1979 by Griffin in collaboration with Father Tom McKillop, the author's close friend and spiritual guide during the last three years of life. That second draft was edited by Conger Beasley for the cloth edition. But because both Father McKillop and Griffin's widow, Elizabeth, did not favor all the deletions Beasley had made from the second draft, yet a fourth and final draft was agreed upon for cloth publication.. The Hermitage Journals, then, was the last book Griffin prepared for publication under contract, although it appeared posthumously.

"In my teens, when I was a student at the Lycéee Descartes, in Tours, France," wrote Griffin in the unpublished preface to his Journal, "a man I greatly admired suggested that I begin keeping a journal of my life. He said it was one way of learning to know myself provided I let no one else see it, wrote it honestly and wrote in it even when I felt I had nothing to say.". From the age of sixteen until he was twenty-one, Griffin continued his journal; but when France was about to fall to the Germans, he gave the autograph journals to a schoolmate for safe-keeping, and returned to the states. "Years later when I returned to France [in 19761, I retrieved the journal which had been buried on my friend's father's farm during the war." He began to read his reflections. "It was a sickening experience. Pages were filled with literary analyses, musical analyses, foods we ate, with scarcely a word about the supreme reality of the war which preoccupied us day and night. It was pure escape from that reality rather than any attempt to handle it. I was heartsick to find myself so false.... I burned those pages and did not resume [a journal] until some years later when I was blind and had learned to use the typewriter.". Curiously, it was again on the advice of a man he admired--the theatre critic John Mason Brown--that Griffin began to write. But it was not a journal; it was his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, written in 1949. His mature Journal was launched in December of 1950, during the third year of sightlessness. When.he was not working on novels or short stories, he poured impressions into the Journal, which became a seedbed for most of work he would publish later. We find in its pages fragments and drafts of stories and novels; essays and articles; voluminous meditations on ethics, religion and philosophy; responses to the music he listened to constantly; discussions of cooking, farming and family relationships; insights into the realities of blindness and how the condition is wrongly perceived by the sighted; speculations on psychology, sociology, anthropology and the arts in relation to the diminishment of culture in America. We hear every tone of voice from the compassionate to the dismissive; styles that range from lyric to polemic, from the scholarly to the absurd. At times he was naive and narrowly opinionated; at other times, measured and wise. He reflected on literature and life--the books he had read (and those which were read to him or recorded on tapes) and all the places he had traveled and lived. He was always a bit nostalgic for the high culture of France and the great joy of learning he had discovered in that adopted land; nostalgic also for the year he spent on a remote island in the South Seas living among the native inhabitants. Conversely, he had been horrified by war--both what he had witnessed working in the French Underground and the devastation of combat while in the Air Force in the Pacific.. Reading the Journal one is always aware that it is an intensely human document--full of contradictions and paradoxes; hope and despair; criticism of the world and self-criticism; fear and anguish over what often did not matter, as well as heroism in the face of what mattered most. The writing is, by turns, elegant and crude; often brilliant and sometimes ignorant; and splattered with passages that roar with comic hyperbole or soar with a spiritual clarity. But always one reads as if one has discovered a secret document; that one is looking over the shoulder of a man who is truely alive in the immense process of becoming a genuine artist and thinker. And later we meet the justly famous author who has absorbed the profound wisdom of humility.. This massive Journal runs to 2,762 pages of single-spaced typed pages. This page count does not include ten autograph notebooks he kept away from the typewriter nor the published books (previously mentioned) that were pulled out of the overall Journal and composed into separate books.. During the period of his blindness--recorded in the Journal from December of 1950 until sight-recovery in January of 1957--he typed almost 900 pages in a span of just slightly more than six years. That is roughly 150 pages each year. Yet, the count for 1951, the first full year of keeping the Journal, is 231 pages (the third highest volume for any year). This was a period of intense introspection for Griffin, he was in the process of making what the French call "the great yes" or the leap of faith from indecision to belief; Griffin became a convert to Catholicism in 1952.. In 1954 we find the second most voluminous year with 255 pages. That year, he was suffering not only from the complications of blindness and diabetes, but he had contracted spinal malaria--a condition which paralyzed him from the waist down and confined him to a wheelchair. All he could do was sit at the typewriter, listen to music, and write.. The entries of 1954 record a very real agony and ecstasy. Griffin experienced the most alienating depths of despair alternating with some of the greatest spiritual heights of his life. Without the love and understanding of his young wife (Elizabeth Holland and Griffin married in 1953), as well as his parents and also her parents--and with absolute faith in God--he would not have survived the ordeal. Instead he wrote about everything that year and drafted over 400 pages of Nuni, his second novel.. In the decade of blindness--from 1947 to early 1957--Griffin composed five novels (two were published, two remain unpublished and the fifth was lost); over sixty short stories (most unpublished); a short book on blindness (Handbook For Darkness); music lectures and articles; and nearly a thousand pages in the Journal . Virtually all of his fiction--literally thousands of pages--were written during the decade of sightlessness. Except for revisions of earlier novels in draft and one short piece of humor ("Pilgrimage"), his career as a fiction writer was over when he regained his sight.. During the 1960s he managed to average over100 pages per year in the Journal, including the second highest page count (248) in 1966. In general, however, these entries move away from introspection toward the concerns of a public life--a-decade which found him away from the studio and his expanding family and in a world of turmoil. His writings were much shorter and their focus was temporal not eternal. He published polemical and journalistic articles on racism, injustice, war, censorship, politics, and lectured extensively on these same issues (and, of course, specifically- on his experiences in Black Like Me, its aftermath, and the civil rights battles that followed. He wrote brilliantly and courageously, and his lectures and writings were in great demand. But the public life took its toll on the books he was forced to leave unfinished (novels as well as Scattered Shadows), and what limited private time that remained was spent with his family and friends and in the darkroom (where his photographic career blossomed), but not in the writing studio. Those years also took their toll on his fragile health. He was no longer blind and the paralysis had lasted only one year, but the stress of his schedule far from solitude increased the debilitating effects of his diabetic condition. He experienced blackouts and exhaustion. His Journal records all this activity in a cryptic rather than expansive manner.. With his appointment as the Official Biographer of Thomas Merton, illness turned toward relative health, exhaustion was replaced by energy, and Griffin once again found spiritual joy in solitude and a fascinating long-range project. The Journal, from 1970-1980 runs about 650 pages--about 65 pages as an annual average with only 1975 accumulating more than 200 pages. This drop in production was a result of the work on the biography and that includes The Hermitage Journals factored out of the equation, as well as a tremendous amounts of photographic work--choices that Griffin was pleased to make, of course. But other factors--not of his choosing--also impacted upon the Journal. There was a significant decline in his health (this is why the entries are more than three times the volume of 1970-1974; he was confined and unable to travel to Gethsemani and Europe where so much research had been accomplished); and there was also the countless intrusions of the curious making pilgrimages to his door.. The Autograph Notebooks, which Griffin considered part of his overall Journal, are from widely different time-frames. Written in spiral notebooks or bound composition books that Griffin carried on his travels when having a typewriter was impossible or inconvenient; these generally reflect a specific event or span of days that can be integrated by dated passage into the overall scheme of his personal Journal.

The School of Journalism was established through monies left to Columbia University in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, renowned photojournalist and newspaper magnate, who passed away in 1911. The original agreements regarding the establishment and organization of the school were made in 1903 and 1904, but the school did not actually open until 1912 – a year after Pulitzer died. The School of Journalism began as an undergraduate school offering a B.Litt. Degree to its graduates, but in 1935 the School became the first in the nation to adopt a program exclusively at the graduate level.