Collections by Subject: British Literary Figures
A Selected List of Holdings in Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries
For more information about how to access materials in this guide, please visit the Maryland Room web page or fill out an information request.
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Authors and Poets Collection, 1880-1989 and undated. 8.75 linear feet and 24 items.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Created from the combination of miscellaneous literary manuscript collections, Authors and Poets is a diffuse collection of correspondence, manuscripts, page and galley proofs, publications, serials, sound recordings, photographs, and ephemera relating to various literary figures. The bulk of the collection consists of materials by and relating to the publishing activities of twentieth-century American authors, such as William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Aldington and journalists such as H. L. Mencken and Derek Stanford.
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George Barker papers, 1930-1972. 1.25 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
British poet George Barker (1913-1991) was born in Loughton, Essex. Barker left school at fourteen, having acquired a love of verse but little else. Barker was a prolific writer, having published over 30 volumes of poetry and earning the respect of fellow poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. Barker also published short stories, critical essays, and two novels, Alanna Autumnal (1933) and The Dead Seagull (1951). He held professorships at Imperial Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan; the State University of New York College at Buffalo; the University of Wisconsin; and Florida International University. This collection consists of ten notebooks of Barker's observations, poems, and lecture notes that were created between 1967 and 1971. There are also notes and manuscripts for various other Barker works, dating from 1939 to 1971.
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T. S. Eliot Collection, 1914-1973. 1.00 linear foot.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), a poet, critic, editor, and playwright, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a B. A. in 1909 and an M. A. in 1910 from Harvard, where he also pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy. In 1915, he married Vivienne (Vivien) Haigh-Wood. He was literary editor of the avant-garde magazine The Egoist. In the Spring 1917, he published his first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1922, Eliot published "The Waste Land" and became editor of The Criterion. 1927 was a momentous year for Eliot. In June, he was baptized into the Church of England, and, in November, became a British citizen. His religion then became a central component of his life and his poetry reflected this religious conversion. In 1948, Eliot received both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The collection includes correspondence; manuscripts and proofs of published Eliot literary works such as "Lines to a Persian Cat," "In silent corridors of death," and "The Love-Song of J. Arthur Prufrock;" galley proofs for plays and collections of poetry; manuscripts of Vivienne (Haigh-Wood) Eliot; serial publications with contributions by Eliot; newspaper clippings; a proof of a literary review of Eliot; manuscripts written by other individuals; programs and playbills.
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Thom Gunn papers, 1951-1983. 2.75 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Thom Gunn (b. 1929) is a British poet who has lived in the United States since 1954. He has published over thirty books of poetry, a collection of essays, and four edited collections. His work is extensively represented in literary anthologies. Gunn combines an interest in traditional poetics with less traditional subjects, such as Hell's Angels, LSD, and homosexuality. The collection includes drafts, notebooks, publications, correspondence, and photographs. The bulk of the collection includes materials from his books Positives (1966) and Touch (1967).
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Jupiter Recordings Ltd. Records, 1955-1970. 0.50 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Jupiter Recordings, Ltd. (1958-1970), was an audio recording production company based in London, England, founded by actor, playwright and author of fiction V. C. Clinton-Baddeley (1900-1970). The firm's recordings include spoken word and poetry set to music. They were read by the poets themselves or by British actors and scholars. This collection of correspondence includes requests to poets for their collaboration and to publishers for permission and royalty agreements. Individual correspondents include Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, Thomas Blackburn, Charles Causley, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Roy Fuller, Zulikar Ghose, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Lauri Lee, Christopher Logue, Edward Lucie-Smith, Peter Porter, Henry Reed, W. R. Rodgers, R. S. Thomas, and John Wain.
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Edward Lucie-Smith papers, 1963-1975. 5.75 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Edward Lucie-Smith (b. 1933) is a critic, poet, free-lance journalist, and editor. He was a partner in Turret Books, a small private press in London. His most important publications are Towards Silence, Thinking About Art, Movements in Art Since 1945, Concise History of French Painting: From 1930 to the Present, World of the Makers: Today's Master Craftsmen and Women, and Art in Britain, 1969-70. The collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts, notes, essays, articles, and poetry broadsides representing the literary and business interests and production of Lucie-Smith. Significant correspondents represented in the collection include Turret Books, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Peter Quennell, Adrian Henri, and the Arts Council of Great Britain.
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Frances McCullough papers, 1915-1994. 18 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Frances Monson McCullough (1938- ), editor and cookbook author, was born in Quantico, Virginia. She graduated from Stanford University in 1960 with a B. A. and completed post-graduate work at Brandeis University in 1960-1961. She began her career as an editor at Harper & Row in 1963, moved to Dial Press in 1980, and on to Bantam Books in 1986. She has worked with authors and poets including Djuna Barnes, Ted Hughes, Laura (Riding) Jackson, N. Scott Momaday, William DeWitt Snodgrass, and Robert Bly. This collection spans the years 1915-1994 and includes correspondence; proofs for Ladies Almanack and Creatures in an Alphabet by Djuna Barnes; a manuscript for a biography of Djuna Barnes; ephemera; and photographs. The collection is unprocessed, but a preliminary inventory is available.
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Hope Mirrlees papers, 1920-1960. 0.25 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was an author of novels, poems, and translations. However, she is most remembered for her circle of literary friends, which included T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. She published two novels, Lud-in-the-Mist and Counterplot, and a book of poetry, Moods and Tensions: Poems. She began, but never completed, a biography of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton; part of this was published as A Fly in Amber in 1962. With Jane Harrison, she produced two translations of Russian literature, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself and The Book of the Bear. Her papers consist solely of correspondence; significant correspondents include T. S. Eliot, Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf, and Leonard Woolf.
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Lady Ottoline Morrell papers, 1916-1934. 0.25 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938) was a British-born literary hostess of the World War I era. Her group of friends, including D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forester, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf, was known as the Bloomsbury Group. They often met at one of the Morrell homes at Bedford Square, Gower Street, or the country home at Garsington. The collection includes correspondence and publications documenting Lady Morrell's literary interests. Significant correspondents include Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf.
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William Morris Papers, 1885-1904. 0.25 linear feet and 9 items.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
English author, designer, manufacturer, and artist William Morris (1834-1896) is best known for his association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and as a central figure of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. He was influential in the emergence of socialism in England in the nineteenth century, having founded the Socialist League in 1884. Morris's more well known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (18681870), A Dream of John Ball (1892) and News from Nowhere (1893). In 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, which produced books modeled after fifteenth-century incunabula. The press produced 53 titles during its 7-year operation. His 1896 edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, called the Kelmscott Chaucer, is often regarded a pinnacle of book design. The collection includes correspondence from Sydney Cockerell, Jane Morris, and William Morris, a manuscript of poetry by Stopford Augustus Brooke, and nine reels of microfilm of the British Library's William Morris papers.
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Archives of the Poetry Book Society, 1962-1970. 0.25 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
The Poetry Book Society was founded in 1953 under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain to foster the art of poetry and to promote the work of contemporary poets. It continued to operate as recently as 2005. The first directors included B. H. Blackwell, Joseph Compton, R. N. David, T. S. Eliot, Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton, and Erica Marx. Eric W. White became the Society's first secretary. The society mails subscribers a book of poetry quarterly, accompanied by a Bulletin containing a contribution from the selected poet of the quarter. The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, proofs and issues of the Society's Bulletin, and files relating to various poets. Among the significant figures represented are Barry Cole, Martin Dodsworth, Douglas Dunn, John Fuller, Geoffrey Grigson, Thom Gunn, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, David Holbrook, and Charles Osborne.
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Archives of Turret Books, 1965-1975. 8.25 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Turret Books is a small press located in London, England, that specializes in publishing a series of booklets in limited editions. It published as recently as 1992. Records of the press consist of correspondence, publications, poetry manuscripts, proofs for publication, posters, newspaper clippings, financial records, and artwork documenting the operation and output of Turret Books. Significant figures represented in the collection include Barry Cole, Lawrence Durrell, Edward Lucie-Smith, Allen Ginsberg, George MacBeth, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Bernard Stone, Georg Rapp, Christopher Logue, and Jonathan Williams. An addendum, consisting of audio tapes, is unprocessed but is described in a preliminary inventory.
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Arnold Yates Paper Collection, 1850-1976. 0.5 linear feet.
Location: Literature and Rare Books
Arnold Yates, 1900-1971, born in Cheshire, UK, was apprenticed as a tool-maker at age 14. Through his membership in the Liverpool Branch of the Independent Labour Party and his own interest and study, he became an expert on William Morris and began collecting Morris materials. In 1919, he opened a bookshop in Liverpool, but, in 1921, joined Messers A. E. Parry and Co., Booksellers, eventually selling the business in 1949 and retiring to the Cotswolds. A bibliophile and collector from adolescence, he never realized his dream of operating a private press. The Arnold Yates Collection contains correspondence to Yates, published and unpublished writings on paper and paper manufacturing, paper samples, and a privately published pamphlet about Yates. The entire collection spans the period from 1850 to 1976 with the majority of the materials falling between 1949 and 1959.