Search

Correspondence, manuscripts, diaries, commonplace books, drawings, photographs, and printed materials. The collection is a comprehensive documentation of the dramatist's career and includes manuscripts, typescripts, notes, and costume and scenic design for more than seventy of his plays and related writings; 31 diaries, commonplace books, and scrapbooks containing manuscript and typescript notes, travel sketches, original drawings, and photographs; and correspondence files including letters from Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, John Galsworthy, Booth Tarkington, and Thornton Wilder. Austin Strong's mother, Isobel Field, was the step-daughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. Consequently, the collection contains much Stevensoniana, including photographs and Isobel Field's letters from Western Samoa, where she was known as "Teuila." Also, correspondence and photographs relating to Cornwall Park, Auckland, New Zealand, which was designed by Austin Strong.

Correspondence and publishing agreements for many of their authors in the pre-World War I period.

A three page letter to William Aeneas MacKintosh, undated

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.