Restrictions to Access

CLOSED: Correspondence in Series 1 and diaries and journals in Series 2 are CLOSED until 2013.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

• Actors--North Carolina--History--20th century.
• Artists--North Carolina--History--20th century.
• Authors, American--North Carolina--20th century.
• Carolina Playmakers.
• Chapel Hill (N.C.)--Social life and customs.
• Green, Paul, 1894-1981. Lost colony.
• Illustrators--United States.
• North Carolina--Drama.
• North Carolina--Intellectual life--20th century.
• Order of Gimghoul (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
• Prince, Lillian Hughes, d. 1962.
• Prince, William Meade, 1893-1951.
• Prince, William Meade, 1893-1951. Southern part of heaven.
• Repertory theater--North Carolina--History--20th century.
• Richardson, Howard. Dark of the moon.
• Theater, Open-air--North Carolina--History--20th century.
• Theater--North Carolina.
• University of North Carolina (1793-1962). Dept. of Art.
• Women in the theater--United States--History--20th century.

• North Carolina Collection Gallery, UNC-CH: oil portrait of Lillian Hughes Prince by William Meade Prince; playbill for the Cort Theatre inscribed "To Lillian with affection Freddie"; framed certificate conferring lifetime membership to Lillian Prince in the Actors' Fund of America in New York City; framed photographs of Lillian Prince's mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Hughes, 1891, and of Lillian Prince in costume; series of charcoal portraits on beige paper by William Meade Prince, most done for a book on the Kenan professorships at the University of North Carolina; one of six ship models donated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, UNC-CH: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Department of Dramatic Art (Collection 35).
• Rare Book Collection, UNC-CH: one of the posters William Prince created for the American Field Hospital Corps during World War II.

William Meade Prince (9 July 1893-10 November 1951) was born in Roanoke, Va. and lived in Chapel Hill with his parents and grandfather, Episcopal rector Dr. William Meade, from age five to fifteen. Prince then moved to Birmingham, Ala., to work for a short time. He studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, 1913-1915, and, upon winning a contest sponsored by Collier's magazine, began his career as a magazine and book illustrator. Prince illustrated stories for magazines such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Red Book, and Cosmopolitan. He also produced illustrations for the work of authors such as James Street, Philip Wylie, Kathleen Norris, William Saroyan, and Arnold Bennet. He was noted for his illustrations of the stories of Roark Bradford, and, among other advertising assignments, did a long-running advertising campaign for Dodge cars.

After moving to Chapel Hill with his wife, Lillian Hughes Prince (17 June 1893-25 February 1962), whom he met while in Birmingham, Ala., and married in 1915, Prince became involved with acting. During this time, he remained active as an illustrator and taught in the Art Department of the University of North Carolina. He also produced The Southern Part of Heaven (1950), the best-selling memoir of his childhood. During World War II, Prince was for a time as acting head of the University of North Carolina Art Department and also did drawings and posters for the Committee to Defend America, the American Field Hospital Corps, and the USO.

Lillian Hughes Prince had been active with the Westport Players when she lived in Westport, Conn., and had studied acting with Harry Irvine at the Academy of Allied Art in New York City. From the 1930s until her death in 1962, she had parts in many Carolina Playmakers productions, including The House of Connelly by Paul Green, The Little Foxes, Ah, Wilderness!, Our Town, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Showboat, Oklahoma, and Spring For Sure. Prince performed in Blithe Spirit with the Raleigh Little Theater and shortly afterwards joined the cast of Howard Richardson's Dark of the Moon with the Schubert national touring company, where she had the role of the "cunjer woman" during the 1945-1946 season. Prince also performed in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas ( Patience, Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore) and held the role of Queen Elizabeth in Paul Green's outdoor drama The Lost Colony during the summers from 1947 through 1953.

William Prince also acted in some of the plays in which his wife was involved, including Ah, Wilderness!, Blithe Spirit, and The Lost Colony, in which he played Ananias Dare. After the success of The Southern Part of Heaven, which he also illustrated, Prince began working on two other books. One was to be a record of a trip that he and Lillian made out West. Prince was working on the other project, apparently a sequel to his boyhood memoirs, when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Chapel Hill home in November 1951. Lillian Prince died in New York in 1962. The couple had one adopted daughter Caroline, who returned to her biological parents in 1941. Both William and Lillian Prince are buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.

Personal correspondence, most of it between the William and Lillian Prince during their courtship, constitutes most of these papers. Over the years, the correspondence between the Princes records the development of William Prince's career as an artist and his wife's career as a stage actress. Many of the letters are from times when Lillian Prince was on tour with stage productions, particularly 1945-1946, when she played the "cunjer woman" with the Schubert national touring company in Dark of the Moon by Howard Richardson. Other correspondence relates to the 1950 Rinehart & Co. publication of William Prince's boyhood memoir of Chapel Hill, N.C., The Southern Part of Heaven. His tenure during World War II as head of the Art Department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, as well as his activities during the war making posters and drawings for the Committee to Defend America, the American Field Hospital Corps, and the USO are also documented. Professional correspondence concerning William Prince's career as an illustrator and writer is present in both the personal correspondence series and in professional correspondence in the collected material series. The same is true for correspondence relating to Lillian Prince's stage career.

Journals and diaries for both Princes are included in the writing series, as are several drafts of two unfinished books by William Prince. Much of the collected material is contained in four scrapbooks, one compiled by Lillian Prince about The Southern Part of Heaven and three others about Lillian Prince's stage career. Financial material concerns the Princes' taxes, stock, and property holdings, as well as some royalty statements for The Southern Part of Heaven. Pictures are chiefly family photographs, some photographs taken from stage productions in which either Lillian or both William and Lillian acted, and photographs of book or magazine illustrations by William Prince. The Addition of 2004 contains photographs, correspondence, and other papers. Photographs are primarily of William Meade Prince and Lillian Hughes Prince, including photographs of the Princes with their adopted daughter Caroline. There are also letters from William Meade Prince to Lillian Hughes Prince written during their courtship, letters to the Princes from Caroline, and other items.

• Pictures (P-3660/folders 1-39)
• Oversize photographs (OP-P-3660/folders 1-2)
• Oversize volumes (S-3660/1, 3, 4)