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Correspondence, manuscripts, notes, notebooks, documents, photographs, course-related materials, and printed materials. The manuscripts include typescripts of Sykes' published and unpublished novels, monographs, plays, short stories, and articles. Among these are The Perennial Avant Garde, The Cool Millennium, and The Hidden Remnant. Sykes' notes and notebooks span the period from the early 1930s to 1980, and include preliminary ideas and sketches for his books, as well as autobiographical material. A small number of documents concern Sykes' wartime work in the U.S. Government Office of War Information. Course-related material including writings and correspondence of students taught by Sykes between 1962 and 1975 at the New School and as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Printed materials consist of numerous reviews of Sykes' books, in addition to offprints and articles by Sykes. Included as well are printed materials about or connected with Sykes, offprints of articles inscribed to him, and many volumes from his library. The substantial correspondence series includes personal letters and correspondence with agents and publishers relating to his books. Correspondents include Harold Clurman, Aaron Copland, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Francis Steegmuller, as well as a number of Sykes' students. There is extensive correspondence between Sykes and the artist John Hartell from 1927 to 1983.

These files concern the publication of Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, the dramatization of this diary and the subsequent legal disputes with Meyer Levin over the play, and the motion picture made from the play. They also deal with the activities of the Anne Frank Foundation, primarily support for the renovation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the programs of the International Anne Frank Youth Center. These files include 145 letters from her father, Otto Frank, and letters from Alfred Kazin, Max Lerner, Meyer Levin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. There are also seven letters from Adela Rogers St. Johns and related materials about her own books and the 1963 volume of minutes of the Doubleday & Co. Publishing Committee.