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A collection of letters from authors, critics, and scholars, primarily relating to lectureships and courses given under the auspices of the English Department. Some of the correspondence, notably the ten letters from Amy Lowell, deal with essays written for the revised edition of C.D. Warner's LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE. The letters are written to Ashley H. Thorndike, John W. Cunliffe, George R. Carpenter, Ernest H. Wright, and Marjorie Nicolson. The correspondents include John Mason Brown, Marchette Chute, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Padraic Colum, Bernard DeVoto, T.S. Eliot, John Erskine, Robert Frost, Otto Jespersen, Howard Mumford Jones, Joyce Kilmer, Ludwig Lewishon, Amy Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Thomas Mann, Brander Matthews, H.L. Mencken, Christopher Morley, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles P. Snow, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. Two boxes of miscellaneous uncataloged correspondence cover the years, 1896-1917, and a folder for the 1935 Mark Twain Centennial sponsored by the English Department. The correspondence is chiefly with Ernest Hunter Wright.

The main body of this collection contains letters from Carpenter to Robert W. Herrick (1868-1938), a student of his at Harvard from 1888 to 1890, and later a colleague on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty, 1890-1893. At this time Herrick went to teach at the University of Chicago and Carpenter came to Columbia. Much of this correspondence is concerned with helping his friend Herrick break into the professional writers' world. Items of personal interest are also discussed in these letters to a long-time friend. Three early letters, 1886-1888, are written to his mother from Paris and Berlin where he spent the two years of the Rogers Fellowship upon his graduation from Harvard in 1886. More descriptive than personal, they tell his impressions of these countries and news items of the day. In addition there is an 11-page manuscript by Carpenter entitled "My Impressions of France" written ca. 1888. There is also a scrapbook of clippings from newspapers and magazines of writings by Carpenter from 1892 to 1905. Included are book reviews, literary writings and some items relating to Columbia University.