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The collection consists of the editorial and production archives of Random House, Inc. from its founding in 1925 to the 1990s. The correspondence and editorial files include many of the prominent novelists and short story writers from 20th-century American and European literature: Saul Bellow; Erskine Caldwell; Truman Capote; William Faulkner; Sinclair Lewis; André Malraux; Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Among the poets there are files for W. H. Auden; Allen Ginsberg; Robinson Jeffers; Robert Lowell; and Stephen Spender. In the area of theater there are files for Maxwell Anderson; Moss Hart; Lillian Hellman; Eugene O'Neill; and Tennessee Williams. Random House transacted business with many fine presses and noted typographers and the archives contain files for Nonesuch Press, Grabhorn Press and Golden Cockerel Press, as wll as for Bruce Rogers, Valenti Angelo, and Edwin, Jane, and Robert Grabhorn.

Correspondence and manuscripts. The collection includes manuscript drafts and typescripts of two volumes of his autobiography: THE OLD CENTURY AND SEVEN MORE YEARS, 1938; and THE WEALD OF YOUTH, 1942. There are also 13 volumes of early notebooks for the period 1894 until 1909 (from age 8 to 22) containing drafts of over 200 poems, 19 short stories and many drawings. There is some correspondence about the autobiography. Also includes 21 letters from Arnold Bennett, 51 letters from Lady Ottoline Morrell, 26 letters from H.M. Tomlinson, 19 letters from Sassoon to his mother-in-law, Lady Gatty, 22 letters from Sassoon to his son, letters from many others, and a typescript of his poem "A love affair" with holograph note