Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

The collection contains correspondence with the authors, including contracts signed with authors as well as negotiations with the authors over various aspects of publishing their works; financial records documenting many aspects of the operation of Harper & Brothers, including royalties paid to authors, records of stock offerings and company reorganizations, and general ledgers which contain daily notes on all aspects of the operation of the business; book catalogues and trade lists; research materials collected by Eugene Exman for his history of Harper & Brothers; visual materials, from drawings and photographs of Harper's authors to colophon designs and an oil painting of the original Harper's building.

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.

The editorial and production files of Pantheon Books from 1944 through 1968. The correspondence from authors, agents, and publishers is written to Kurt and Helen Wolff, Jacques Schiffrin, André Schiffrin, and the editors of the firm. The files document the publication of works by A. Alvarez, Georges Bernanos, Hermann Broch, Jacob Burckhardt, Albert Camus, William Demby, Eugene Ionesco, Karl Jaspers, Winifred Bryher, Jacques Maritain, Isamu Noguchi, José Ortega y Gasset, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sir Herbert Read, Ben Shahn, and others.

This collection includes nine letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as letters of Louis Agassiz, Amos Bronson Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In addition, there are two incomplete manuscripts by Emerson and one document from the Liverpool Custom-house signed by Nathaniel Hawthorne as Consul for the United States. The collection also includes the corrected typescript, index, and page and galley proofs for Thomas Franklin Currier, A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (New York, 1953) which was edited by Professor Tilton. Also, some early correspondence and photographs of the Tilton family and friends. There are letters from the actors Annie Louise Ames, Richard J. Dillon, and Hans L. Meery to Tilton's grandfather, Bernard Paul Verne, as well as photographs, tintypes, and daguerreotypes of the Verne family and friends.

Manuscripts and correspondence of Weaver, including the typescripts of BLACK VALLEY and HERMAN MELVILLE: MARINER AND MYSTIC, as well as notes and correspondence relating to these works.

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.

A group of letters and manuscripts of Morley. The five letters are to various persons. Among the manuscripts are an early poem"The Flags on Fifth Avenue" (1916); an essay entitled "In the Steerage of the Lusitania;" a one-act play entitled "On the Shelf;" and a 1941 revision of Shakespeare's TEMPEST.

Correspondence, articles, photographs, clippings, and other ephemera about the career and writings of Robert William Chambers (1865-1933), collected by Clark. The collection includes six letters from Chambers, one letter from John Kendrick Bangs to Chambers, and 14 scrapbooks which also include printed materials about Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) and George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928). There are also some Clark family photographs and memorabilia.

Manuscripts, typescripts, galley and page proofs and printed versions of several of Bellah's stories and books. Most of the stories, which relate to the American Civil War, were published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST. Several items of related correspondence are included. The titles in the collection are: "First Blood at Harper's Ferry" "How Stonewall Came Back" "The Secret of the Seven Days" "Slaughter at Ball's Bluff" "Stonewall Jackson's Way" "Stuart's Charge at Bull Run" "The Valiant Virginians" and "Why Stonewall Jackson got Licked at Kernstown.".