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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.

Notebooks filled with Nelson's ideas and notes on art and poetry, as well as various other subjects, such as translations, women, liberty and democracy, and Americanization, which last shows his bitterness at not having achieved recognition as a creative artist in this country. Also included are quotations from numerous writers (including Samuel Loveman's "The triumph of anarchy" copied from the author's manuscript), with his criticisms on several of them (Stagnelius, a Swedish poet, Amy Lowell, Swinburne, Ezra Pound), on Gounod and Berlioz, on the sculptor Flaxman, and on Nietzsche. There are drafts of letters to various people, and to newspaper editors. Of particular interest is the letter to Hart Crane (see Notebook 1920 November-1921 June), circa May 1921, on whom he had considerable influence, even though their friendship was of brief duration.

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 relating to Erskine's various educational, musical and literary interests; manuscripts of his writings; lecture notes for college courses; souvenirs of his army service in World War I and his Columbia University professorship, and student papers from his own school and college days. Also, biographical file, scrapbooks, and articles.