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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.

Correspondence, playscripts, screenplays, scenarios, short stories, and other manuscripts, drafts, photocopies, contracts and other documents, tearsheets, clippings, and other materials relating to his career as a screenwriter, playwright, and author of short stories. Correspondence with friends, students, admirers, and professional colleagues concern his teaching, playwriting, films, articles, photography, and literary topics. There are also two groups of letters from students and readers about his textbook, "The Human Nature of Playwriting" (1949). Among the cataloged correspondence are William Gibson, MacKinlay Kantor, Anna Louise Strong, Louis Untermeyer, and Carl Van Doren. Included are manuscripts, drafts, or photocopies of almost all his films, plays, and short stories, such as playscripts and drafts of his plays, "The Jazz Singer" (1922), "Skylark" (1939), "Jason" (1942), and others; screenplays and scenarios, many in photocopy, of "Trouble in Paradise" (1932), "The Merry Widow" (1934), "The Shop Aroung the Corner" (1940), "Suspicion" (1941), "Heaven Can Wait" (1943), and many other films; and manuscripts, drafts, tearsheets, and printed copies of his short stories and articles of film and television criticism. There are also many clippings and reviews, programs, and other printed materials about his plays and films.