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Correspondence and manuscripts of various literary figures, occasionally brought for this library by the Friends of the Columbia University Libraries. Authors include William Harrison Ainsworth, Augustine Birrell, Thomas Campbell, James Fenimore Cooper, Clement Clarke Moore, Carl Sandburg, A. C. Swinburne, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Trollope, and Talcott Williams.

The General Manuscript Collection is an artificial collection of correspondence, diaries, lecture notes, class work, essays, administrative documents, minutes, and other documents collected by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Single items or very small collections are generally classified as part of the general manuscript collection rather than assigned an individual manuscript number. Additionally, small additions to existing RBML manuscript collections may be classified as part of the General Manuscript Collection.

A collection of letters, manuscripts, proofs, and drawings of English and American authors, including 33 letters from Alan Gabriel Barnsley (Gabriel Fielding) to Derek Stanford; a letter from James Boswell to George Colman the younger; a letter from Wilkie Collins; a letter from James Fenimore Cooper to William Buell Sprague; a letter from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik; letters from E.M. Forster; letters from Sarah Grand to James B. Pond; letters from T.B. Macauley; a letter from Hester Lynch Piozzi to James Robson; letters and cards from G.B. Shaw; letters from R.B. Sheridan to Thomas Grenville and to C. Ward, and a letter from Elizabeth Ann Linley Sheridan to R.B. Sheridan; a letter from William Wordsworth to F.W. Faber; a letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Benjamin Disraeli; letters from Anthony Trollope written to Frederic Chapman, Mary Christie, J.T. Fields, Frederic Harrison, and others; letters from Ellen Terry and Rhoda Broughton, and postcards from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Ackroyd. The manuscripts include examples by Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, John Burroughs, Ivy Compton-Burnett, A.E. Coppard, Baron Corvo, Cecil Day Lewis, Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, A.P. Herbert, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, Henry W. Longfellow, Amy Lowell, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester, G.B. Shaw, Edith Sitwell, and Logan Pearsall Smith.

Papers of the Jay family and of those families related to the Jay family, including Bruen, Butterworth, Chapman, Clarkson, Dawson, Du Bois, Field, Iselin, McVickar, Mortimer, O'Kill, Pellew, Pierrepont, Prime, Robinson, Schieffelin, Von Schweinitz, Sedgwick, and Wurts. In addition to family and personal matters, the correspondence deals with anti-slavery, New York State civil service, repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, the Blair Bill, international affairs, and New York City and State politics and government. There are letters from numerous prominent persons including George Bancroft, F.A.P. Barnard, Bismarck, William Cullen Bryant, Aaron Burr, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamilton Fish, Albert Gallatin, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Frances Anne Kemble, Jenny Lind, Henry W. Longfellow, Seth Low, James Russell Lowell, John Stuart Mill, Alice Duer Miller, Clement Clarke Moore, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Nast, Commodore Matthew Perry, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Carl Schurz, William H. Seward, William T. Sherman, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

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.

Correspondence, manuscript, and drawings relating to English and American literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries collected by Solton (1896-1961) and Julia (-1984) Engel. Ten letters and four manuscripts of poems by Rudyard Kipling form the largest unit within the collection. Prominent among the other items are the manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Mock Trial" and two Walt Whitman letters, a copy of R. W. Emerson's famous "Leaves of Grass" letter in Whitman's hand and Whitman's letter to Conway regarding the Emerson letter. Also included is a letter from James Fenimore Cooper to Mary Rutherfurd Clarkson Jay, wife of Peter Augustus Jay. Thirty-one of the drawings in the collection are by William Wallace Denslow and John Rae Neill and represent illustrations done for various works by L. Frank Baum. There are also two drawings of Gelett Burgess, one ot "The Goop" and the other of "The Purple Cow." Castings of the obverse and reverse of the bronze Kipling medallion commissioned by Engel in 1953 from Julio Kilenyi are stored in 2 oversize boxes. Most of the items in this collection relate to a collection of first editions which was also presented to the Libraries by Mr. and Mrs. Engel.