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The Elisabeth Sifton Papers span much of Mrs. Sifton's working life. General correspondence is filed alphabetically by last name and includes correspondence related to the day-to-day business of publising, as well as correspondence related to projects ultimately not realized by Mrs. Sifton. Author-specific files deal with projects that Mrs. Sifton worked extensively on. Some files lack information that remains in the archives of the publishing house where the project was completed. Work life files deal with involvement in various professional associations, classes taught by Mrs. Sifton, and some of Mrs. Sifton's own published writing.

Correspondence with authors and other well-known figures, and also manuscripts of her own writings.

The collection consists of the editorial and production archives of Random House, Inc. from its founding in 1925 to the 1990s. The correspondence and editorial files include many of the prominent novelists and short story writers from 20th-century American and European literature: Saul Bellow; Erskine Caldwell; Truman Capote; William Faulkner; Sinclair Lewis; André Malraux; Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Among the poets there are files for W. H. Auden; Allen Ginsberg; Robinson Jeffers; Robert Lowell; and Stephen Spender. In the area of theater there are files for Maxwell Anderson; Moss Hart; Lillian Hellman; Eugene O'Neill; and Tennessee Williams. Random House transacted business with many fine presses and noted typographers and the archives contain files for Nonesuch Press, Grabhorn Press and Golden Cockerel Press, as wll as for Bruce Rogers, Valenti Angelo, and Edwin, Jane, and Robert Grabhorn.