This collection of books and pamphlets opens with a Christopher Columbus letter of 1493 and Martin Waldseemuller's Cosmographie introductio.

The pages of the past are opened to students of American literature, history, and culture through this documentation of pre-1900 Americana. It also includes Richard Hakluyt's famous Divers Voyages and other narratives of travel and exploration, writings by Increase and Cotton Mather, sermons and religious treatises, descriptions and histories of the early colonies, accounts of Indians and Indian captives, and pamphlets on witchcraft and colonial government.

Eighteenth-century selections offer a literary dimension through the poems of John Adams and letters by Jonathan Dickinson, and post-Revolutionary writers such as David Humphreys, John Hope, and Noah Webster. A political overview is added in various tracts on slavery and unfair taxation. The 250 titles in this collection are indexed by author, title, and subject in American Culture Series, 1493-1875, A Cumulative Guide, edited by Ophelia Lo.

American magazine journalism began in 1741 with Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and Andrew Bradford's American Magazine. These and other publications in this first series reflect the political and cultural birth of the U.S. and include the first American short stories published in Massachusetts Magazine (1789-96).

The 89 titles in American Periodicals Series I provide valuable research material for students in various disciplines. Students of literature and journalism history, for example, find particularly useful the Independent Reflector (1752-53), one of the best examples of essay journalism from that era. For historians, firsthand accounts of the Revolution, as well as descriptions of the latest inventions, can be found in Tom Paine's Pennsylvania Magazine (1775-76).

This 18th-century collection also contains publications in the fields of religion, music, and science, including Medical Repository (1797-1800), America's first scientific journal. Series I is a well-rounded introduction to American periodical journalism as it grew with the nation.

Contains 466 broadsides, satires, and other ephemera illustrative of English history and social life collected by John Patrick Crichton Stuart, third marquess of Bute (1847-1900). Filmed in chronological order, the material reveals many political and social aspects of 17th century life and includes pieces not recorded elsewhere. The 98-page Bute Broadsides in Houghton Library, Harvard University: Reel Guide to the Microfilm Collection is included.

The Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscript Collection covers primarily the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812 (ca. 1755-1815). The geographic concentration is on what Draper and his contemporaries called the "Trans-Allegheny West," which included the western Carolinas and Virginia, some portions of Georgia and Alabama, the entire Ohio River valley, and parts of the Mississippi River valley.

Military records and information are pervasive throughout the Draper Manuscripts. Particular strengths include the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, especially those actions which occurred in the West. The Guide to the Draper Manuscripts specifically indexes Revolutionary War pension applicant information. Other strengths are Indian conflicts and westward explorations in which the Military played a role, such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Only a small part of the collection consists of original documents of the Revolutionary period. The bulk of the files are Draper's research notes and correspondence. The collection as a whole is extremely varied and includes correspondence, interview notes, extracts from newspapers and other published sources, muster rolls, transcripts of official documents, and much more.

To make this large and often unwieldy collection available to the research public, the Wisconsin Historical Society has produced a microfilm edition of the entire collection and a comprehensive guide.

This collection brings together every notable item printed in any language in Great Britain and its colonies, and in English anywhere in the world. It is one of the largest single micropublishing ventures ever, and captures the essence of the Enlightenment in England and the Commonwealth countries. The collection is based on the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable compilation of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,000 universities, private and public libraries worldwide. The criteria for inclusion in ESTC require that a particular work has been printed in any language in Great Britain or its territories, or in English anywhere in the world, between 1701 and 1800. This microform collection covers a broad variety of materials, including books and broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons, and printed ephemera. Engraved materials (such as maps or woodblock prints) and newspapers are not included. Nearly 30 major authors are represented, including Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, Alexander Pope, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Swift and more. In addition to its value for scholars in literature, the collection also offers important primary source materials for researchers in education, economics, science, religion and politics. Cumulative Guides and title listings are provided.

This collection contains the items at Lambeth listed by C. M. Andrews and F. G. Davenport in their Guide to the Ms. Material of the History of the United States of America, Washington, D.C., 1908 (pages 287-301). These include 16th and 17th Century voyages, missionaries, Church affairs, education, Indians and slavery. They comprise 7 complete volumes, and scattered references to 18 volumes. Also included are three extracts from manuscripts not included in Andrews & Davenport, because they were late additions to Lambeth Palace Library, and the papers of Thomas Secker (Archbishop of Canterbury 1758-68) relating to the U.S.A.

This is a compilation of issues from various newspapers published during the 1700's in South Carolina.

The collection includes every important play published in the English language in England from the year 1500 through 1880 and in the United States from 1714 through 1830, together with manuscripts never before published. Also included are: the Larpent Collection of manuscript plays (1737-1800) from the Henry E. Huntington Library and Museum; translations of foreign plays from Aristophanes and Plautus to Moliére and Racine.

The plays have been arranged in the following divisions: Elizabethan, Shakespearean, Jacobean, 1516-1641; Restoration drama, 1642-1700; Early 18th century, 1701-1750; Late 18th century, 1751-1800, and the Larpent collection of Manuscript plays, 1737-1800; and the Larpent collection of American plays, 1714-1830. In addition to plays written in England and America this collection includes English translations of foreign plays including works by Aristophanes and Plautus.

The Virginia Gazette was the first newspaper published in Virginia. In addition to the newspaper, the publisher printed the acts of the Virginia Assembly, almanacs, books, broadsides, tracts and pamphlets (available in the Early American Imprints collection). This collection contains the records of the daily transactions of this Williamsburg newspaper printing office. The office served as the colony's bookseller, and among the most interesting entries are those describing the purchase of books, the prices paid, and the purchasers. The Virginia Gazette office also served as Williamsburg's post office, and the entries for postage to various places are prominent in the daybooks. They reflect the diverse activities of the business and indicate the reading tastes and habits of Colonial Virginians.

For libraries providing primary source material on American literature, this collection is among the most comprehensive available anywhere, offering 10,800 novels, romances, tales, short stories, fictitious biographies, travels and sketches, allegories and other works which track the evolution of American literature. The pre-1900 works were taken directly from Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction: A Contribution Towards a Bibliography. Post-1900 works are from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction. Included are the writings of lesser-known authors whose work is often difficult to access from other sources as well as the first edition or earliest available imprints of major American authors.

Included in the collection are William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, the first novel written and published in America; works by Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker school, including James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel P. Willis; and the first short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Late 19th century writers represented include Edward Bellamy, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Henry James.

This collection of books and pamphlets opens with a Christopher Columbus letter of 1493 and Martin Waldseemuller's Cosmographie introductio. The pages of the past are opened to students of American literature, history, and culture through this documentation of pre-1900 Americana, which also includes Richard Hakluyt's famous Divers Voyages and other narratives of travel and exploration, writings by Increase and Cotton Mather, sermons and religious treatises, descriptions and histories of the early colonies, accounts of Indians and Indian captives, and pamphlets on witchcraft and colonial government.

Eighteenth-century selections offer a literary dimension through the poems of John Adams and letters by Jonathan Dickinson, and post-Revolutionary writers such as David Humphreys, John Hope, and Noah Webster. A political overview is added in various tracts on slavery and unfair taxation. The 250 titles in this collection are indexed by author, title, and subject in American Culture Series, 1493-1875, A Cumulative Guide, edited by Ophelia Lo.

The issue of slavery was debated widely and emotionally for decades before it divided the nation during the Civil War. The periodicals from the pre-war era included in American Periodicals Series II provide social historians with a wealth of literature on this volatile issue. The collection includes such materials as: The Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821-39), the first of the many abolitionist journals in this collection; William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator (1831-65), which became the most celebrated abolitionist periodical; and counterpoint publications such as Southern Quarterly Review (1842-57), which upheld the institution of slavery.

The 911 titles in Series II demonstrate the rapid growth of periodicals after 1800 and include virtually all the significant magazines of the period. Hard-to-locate research materials, such as Poe's contributions to Southern Literary Messenger (1831-64) and Hawthorne's New England Magazine (1831-35), are available to literary researchers through this collection. The venerable North American Review (1815-1940) printed much of the era's leading literature including "Thanatopsis," and many other periodicals took literature or drama as their exclusive provinces.

American Periodicals Series II also includes over 20 women's magazines that flourished during this period such as Godey's Lady's Book (1830-98), as well as children's magazines such as The Youth's Companion (1827-1927) and Merry's Museum (1841-72), which was edited for a time by Louisa May Alcott.

Series III includes 118 periodicals from the Civil War and Reconstruction era published during the last half of the 19th century. This select grouping focuses on many of the early important professional journals, such as Publications of the American Economic Association and Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This series also includes many celebrated titles issued by publishing houses-Scribners, Harper's Bazaar, Lippincott's, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal. These popular periodicals are useful in exploring the first examples of modern advertising slogans.

This collection brings together periodicals from 1805-1929 that were issued in Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. While they cover mainstream theater in Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, many of them also reviewed vaudeville, magic, and opera productions. In addition to reviews of productions, the biographical sketches, interviews with actors and actresses, pictures, theater listings, and advertisements found in these periodicals all provide an important source for studying the history of the American stage. A detailed listing of volumes included at the beginning of each reel. The titles included are: The Thespian Mirror, 1805-1806; The Dramatic Mirror, 1829; The Prompter's Whistle, 1850; Stage, 1866; Playbill, 1876-1877; Le Chat Noir, 1889; The Vaudeville, 1898-1906; The Cann-Leighton Official Theatrical Guide, 1896-1971; Stage, 1904-1905; The St. Louis Dramatic News, 1906-1909; The Drama, 1911-1930; Gus Hill's National Theatrical Directory, 1914-1915; The Theatrical Budget, 1823-1828; Figarao, 1850; The Prompter, 1866-1867; The New York Clipper Annual, 1874-1901; Oriole Tidings, 1803-1806; Dramatic Mirror Quarterly, Mahatma, 1895; The Looker-On, 1895-1897; The Burr McIntosh Monthly; Philadelphia Theatrical Guide, 1903-1904; Conjurer's Monthly Magazine, 1906-1908; The New York Star, 1908-1909; and The Theatrical Weekly Record, 1911-1913.

This collection contains over 150,000 pieces of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and literary notices from approximately 900 black periodicals and newspapers, beginning with the in 1827 when the first black periodical appeared. These materials are not generally available in even the largest research libraries, and their acquisition fills in a major gap in the library's holdings.

The importance of local black newspapers and periodicals as repositories of black creative writing is only now being fully recognized. It is as if a hermetically sealed library of Afro-American literature has been rediscovered after a century of neglect.

Black Literature brings together for the first time novels, short stories, poems and reviews scattered throughout scarce black periodicals and newspapers giving students and scholars alike a unique opportunity to understand this vast body of American literature.

1827, the starting date, was the year when Freedom's Journal, the first black periodical, was published. It seems that black authors, denied publication by mainstream American institutions, turned to their own local neighborhood newspapers and magazines to give voice to their literary concerns.

Many of these authors have been identified by the Black Periodical Fiction Project research team. While some were middle class, others were laborers or domestics who would come home after a long day's work and sit down to write a novel or short story or poem. Large numbers of the writers were women who often discuss sexual exploitation and the fact that black women had even less freedom than black men.

Black Literature not only expands vastly the black literary tradition, this fascinating collection, full of vitality and imagination, is of immense social and historical significance in understanding the Afro-American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscript Collection covers primarily the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812 (ca. 1755-1815). The geographic concentration is on what Draper and his contemporaries called the "Trans-Allegheny West," which included the western Carolinas and Virginia, some portions of Georgia and Alabama, the entire Ohio River valley, and parts of the Mississippi River valley.

Military records and information are pervasive throughout the Draper Manuscripts. Particular strengths include the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, especially those actions which occurred in the West. The Guide to the Draper Manuscripts specifically indexes Revolutionary War pension applicant information. Other strengths are Indian conflicts and westward explorations in which the Military played a role, such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Only a small part of the collection consists of original documents of the Revolutionary period. The bulk of the files are Draper's research notes and correspondence. The collection as a whole is extremely varied and includes correspondence, interview notes, extracts from newspapers and other published sources, muster rolls, transcripts of official documents, and much more.

To make this large and often unwieldy collection available to the research public, the Wisconsin Historical Society has produced a microfilm edition of the entire collection and a comprehensive guide.

In 1955, the American Antiquarian Society launched a project to micropublish every existent book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639-1800. The resulting collection would correspond to Charles Evans' historic American Bibliography, enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography.

No single source could bring such a massive undertaking to fruition. The project was subsequently endorsed and sponsored by the Committee on Documentary Reproduction of the American Historical Association. This publishing effort draws from the holdings of major libraries throughout the United States and Europe.

Series I. Evans is the definitive resource of information about every aspect of life in 17th and 18th century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable.

The micropublication of the Evans collection was so well received that Readex and the American Antiquarian Society once again joined forces to continue the project from 1801-1819 with Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker.

Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker provides researchers and scholars with unsurpassed resources documenting a period of history that witnessed immense expansion and intrepid change in the United States. In addition to books, broadsides and pamphlets, the collection includes many published reports, presidential letters and messages, Congressional, state and territorial resolutions, and the works of many European authors reprinted for the American public.

The American Bibliography 1801-1819 by professors Ralph B. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker of Rutgers University provided the basis for the content and the name of the collection.

The collection includes every play published in the English language from the year 1801 through 1900 and in the United States from 1831 through 1900 in printed and manuscript form, whether it be a historical drama, melodrama, comic opera, an unperformed poetic play, pantomime, extravaganza, satiric comedy or burletta. It covers manuscripts, prompt books, acting editions, and published plays. It also includes 19th century translations of foreign plays (from the ancient Greece to Ibsen).

Among American plays both a standard library edition (or an acting edition) of a play and a prompt book of a contemporary performance is included, e.g., David Belasco, Madame Butterfly; Augustin Daly, Under the Gaslight (and more than 50 other stage pieces either written or adapted by Daly), etc. The American Collection is rich in temperance drama and plays on such topical matters as slavery and the Civil War.

Part 1: Theatre periodicals published from 1800 to 1897 housed in the British Library, Bloomsberg. Part 2: Periodicals published from 1880 housed in the British Library Newspaper Library, Colendale. Part 3: From the Theatre Museum, London and the Bodleian, Oxford. There is a list of contents at the beginning of each reel.

The collection includes every important play published in the English language in England from the year 1500 through 1880 and in the United States from 1714 through 1830, together with manuscripts never before published. Also included are: the Larpent Collection of manuscript plays (1737-1800) from the Henry E. Huntington Library and Museum; translations of foreign plays from Aristophanes and Plautus to Moliere and Racine.

The plays have been arranged in the following divisions: Elizabethan, Shakespearean, Jacobean, 1516-1641; Restoration drama, 1642-1700; Early 18th century, 1701-1750; Late 18th century, 1751-1800, and the Larpent collection of Manuscript plays, 1737-1800; and the Larpent collection of American plays, 1714-1830. In addition to plays written in England and America this collection includes English translations of foreign plays including works by Aristophanes and Plautus.

For libraries providing primary source material on American literature, this collection is among the most comprehensive available anywhere, offering 10,800 novels, romances, tales, short stories, fictitious biographies, travels and sketches, allegories and other works which track the evolution of American literature. The pre-1900 works were taken directly from Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction: A Contribution Towards a Bibliography. Post-1900 works are from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction. Included are the writings of lesser-known authors whose work is often difficult to access from other sources as well as the first edition or earliest available imprints of major American authors.

Included in the collection are William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, the first novel written and published in America; works by Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker school, including James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel P. Willis; and the first short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Late 19th century writers represented include Edward Bellamy, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Henry James.

Correspondence from the Anna S. Walling Papers, 1897-1964. Important correspondents include Leonard Abbott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Hutchins Hapgood, Charmian London, Selig Perlman, Charles Edward Russell and Gaylord Wilshire. The Wallings' travels in Russia, ca. 1905-1907, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Jack London and other contemporary literary figures, Samuel Gompers and family problems and concerns are frequent topics discussed in this correspondence.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born to two former slaves in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872. With limited educational opportunities, he went to work as an elevator operator and later became a successful poet-novelist. At the time of his death in 1906, he had written six books of short stories and sketches, in addition to numerous poems, plays, and essays. The Dunbar collection includes his correspondence, scrapbooks, financial records, essays, poems, plays, literary manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and the papers of his wife, schoolteacher and poet Alice Ruth Moore. Correspondence and other papers relating to his large coterie, which included both blacks and whites, provide a glimpse of his life and the times in which he lived.

Soldier, author, statesman, and a white champion of Negro rights in the South, Tourgee wrote many novels based on personal experiences. The native Ohioan published the Greensboro (N.C.) Union Register during the Reconstruction period but often was threatened for his unpopular views and finally moved to New York State.

A large body of the literary remains of Walt Whitman, including correspondence, drafts, variants and fragments of manuscripts in verse and prose, clippings and pamphlets, from the papers presented to the Library of Congress by the late Thomas B. Harned, of Germantown, Pa. in September 1917. In 22 groups assembled by Professor William L. Finkel, but unarranged.

This collection includes copies of 15 original notebooks written by Washington Irving. The notebooks primarily contain notes for some of his major works such as Astoria, Life of George Washington, and Life of Mahomet.

This collection brings together periodicals from 1805-1929 that were issued in Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. While they cover mainstream theater in Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, many of them also reviewed vaudeville, magic, and opera productions. In addition to reviews of productions, the biographical sketches, interviews with actors and actresses, pictures, theater listings, and advertisements found in these periodicals all provide an important source for studying the history of the American stage. A detailed listing of volumes included at the beginning of each reel. The titles included are: The Thespian Mirror, 1805-1806; The Dramatic Mirror, 1829; The Prompter's Whistle, 1850; Stage, 1866; Playbill, 1876-1877; Le Chat Noir, 1889; The Vaudeville, 1898-1906; The Cann-Leighton Official Theatrical Guide, 1896-1971; Stage, 1904-1905; The St. Louis Dramatic News, 1906-1909; The Drama, 1911-1930; Gus Hill's National Theatrical Directory, 1914-1915; The Theatrical Budget, 1823-1828; Figarao, 1850; The Prompter, 1866-1867; The New York Clipper Annual, 1874-1901; Oriole Tidings, 1803-1806; Dramatic Mirror Quarterly, Mahatma, 1895; The Looker-On, 1895-1897; The Burr McIntosh Monthly; Philadelphia Theatrical Guide, 1903-1904; Conjurer's Monthly Magazine, 1906-1908; The New York Star, 1908-1909; and The Theatrical Weekly Record, 1911-1913.

This collection contains over 150,000 pieces of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and literary notices from approximately 900 black periodicals and newspapers, beginning with the in 1827 when the first black periodical appeared. These materials are not generally available in even the largest research libraries, and their acquisition fills in a major gap in the library's holdings.

The importance of local black newspapers and periodicals as repositories of black creative writing is only now being fully recognized. It is as if a hermetically sealed library of Afro-American literature has been rediscovered after a century of neglect.

Black Literature brings together for the first time novels, short stories, poems and reviews scattered throughout scarce black periodicals and newspapers giving students and scholars alike a unique opportunity to understand this vast body of American literature.

1827, the starting date, was the year when Freedom's Journal, the first black periodical was published. It seems that black authors, denied publication by mainstream American institutions, turned to their own local neighborhood newspapers and magazines to give voice to their literary concerns.

Many of these authors have been identified by the Black Periodical Fiction Project research team. While some were middle class, others were laborers or domestics who would come home after a long day's work and sit down to write a novel or short story or poem. Large numbers of the writers were women who often discuss sexual exploitation and the fact that black women had even less freedom than black men.

Black Literature not only expands vastly the black literary tradition, this fascinating collection, full of vitality and imagination, is of immense social and historical significance in understanding the Afro-American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Soldier, author, statesman, and a white champion of Negro rights in the South, Tourgee wrote many novels based on personal experiences. The native Ohioan published the Greensboro (N.C.) Union Register during the Reconstruction period but often was threatened for his unpopular views and finally moved to New York State.

Correspondence from the Anna S. Walling Papers, 1897-1964. Important correspondents include Leonard Abbott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Hutchins Hapgood, Charmian London, Selig Perlman, Charles Edward Russell and Gaylord Wilshire. The Wallings' travels in Russia, ca. 1905-1907, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Jack London and other contemporary literary figures, Samuel Gompers and family problems and concerns are frequent topics discussed in this correspondence.

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a lyric poet, playwright and novelist, and a teacher of French, English and Creative Writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, New York City. Among these papers are Cullen's writings; correspondence; accounts and legal papers; a fragmentary diary (1928); teaching plan books; sheet music; and other miscellaneous papers. The writings include manuscripts of his juvenile novels, The Lost Zoo (1940), My Nine Lives and How I Lost Them (1940), and "The Monkey Baboon" (unpublished, n.d.); his plays, "The Medea of Euripides" (1935), "One Way to Heaven" [ca. 1932], "Heaven's My Home" by Mr. Cullen and Harry Hamilton (unpublished, n.d.), and "St. Louis Woman" by Arna Bontemps and Mr. Cullen (1935 and later versions); poetry, some set to music; and miscellaneous others. Also included are theses and articles written about the life and writings of Cullen. The originals are in the Amistad Research Center, Dillard University, New Orleans, LA.

Beecher's contributions as a radical and reformer encompassed more than his compassion as a poet or his power as a journalist. He was a man of actions as well as words, and he put his beliefs into practice helping those underprivileged by generations of neglect and deprivation. The John Beecher Papers preserves on microfilm his complete papers and works through 1972, and includes not only his creative manuscripts, but also his correspondence, printed materials, speeches, radio scripts about social and political reform, and his testimony before the U.S. Senate on migrant conditions in the United States.

Students of history, political science, literature, journalism, and sociology will find many research opportunities through this collection. For not only was Beecher a gifted writer of poetry and fiction, but his active contributions to society included eight years as administrator of New Deal programs in the South, regional examiner for the original Fair Employment Practice Committee in the South, New York, and New England, and director of displaced persons camps in Germany after World War II. Researchers can draw parallels between his esoteric and sociopolitical accomplishments, as well as gain unique perspectives on FDR's New Deal and other government programs to which Beecher contributed. Students of journalism will find especially interesting those papers relating to Beecher's writings in newspapers including the New York Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, and notable periodicals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and Harpers.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born to two former slaves in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872. With limited educational opportunities, he went to work as an elevator operator and later became a successful poet-novelist. At the time of his death in 1906, he had written six books of short stories and sketches, in addition to numerous poems, plays, and essays. The Dunbar collection includes his correspondence, scrapbooks, financial records, essays, poems, plays, literary manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and the papers of his wife, schoolteacher and poet Alice Ruth Moore. Correspondence and other papers relating to his large coterie, which included both blacks and whites, provide a glimpse of his life and the times in which he lived.

Erskine Caldwell published more than 50 novels during his life. Yet it is his first book, Tobacco Road (1932), for which he is most often remembered. This microfilm edition of 38 personal scrapbooks records the furor caused by Tobacco Road and documents Caldwell's other novels, his work as a journalist and correspondent during World War II, and his involvement as a spokesman for the dispossessed--particularly the poor of his native South.

Graduate and undergraduate researchers in American literature, journalism, theater, and library science find a wealth of research possibilities in these unique papers. The scrapbooks begin with the 1932 publication of Tobacco Road, which one reviewer described as "More than a novel; it is a case study in sociology." The novel's blatant realism generated attempts to ban it. Students can use the legal defenses written in the book's spport as a valuable resource in studying the history of censorship in the U.S.

Caldwell's scrapbooks preserve mementos of the Broadway production of Tobacco Road-- photographs of actors in costume, illustrations, theatrical posters, and a James Thurber cartoon. Articles depicting the range of critical reaction to the stage version can be used as a starting point in tracing periodical criticism of Caldwell's works. Also documented are Caldwell's later works, such as God's Little Acre, and the collaborative works between Caldwell and his wife, noted photographer Margaret Bourke-White, including You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941).

Those interested in his journalistic career will find useful Caldwell's newspaper commentaries on the lives of poor Southern whites and blacks, the practice of lynching, and the effects of the Great Depression in the South. A comparison can then be made between these writings and the elements of social consciousness within Caldwell's literary works.