Stuart Wright Collection: Robert Penn Warren Papers, 1885-1990, undated (bulk 1940-1989)

(Manuscript Collection #1169-014)

Accessions Information

21 June 2010, 4.30 cubic feet; 17 archival boxes & 3 oversized folders; 727 items; 11,790 p. Papers (1885-1990, undated [Bulk: 1940-1989]) documenting the life and literary career of Robert Penn Warren, the noted American poet, novelist, playwright, biographer, and educator, including correspondence; manuscripts, photographic prints, proofs of published materials, printed material, loose manuscripts from the Stuart Wright Book Collection, audio recordings and oversized materials, by or about Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, John Ciardi, Annie Dillard, Fred Chappell, Richard Ghormley Eberhart, Robert Frost, George Garrett, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Albert J. Montesi, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, William Carlos Williams, and others. Vendor: Stuart Wright.

Access Restrictions

No restrictions

Copyright Notice

Literary rights to specific documents are retained by the authors or their descendants in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

Preferred Citation

Stuart Wright Collection - Robert Penn Warren Papers (#1169-014) East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA

Acquisition Information

• Purchased from Stuart Wright, 6/21/2010

Processing Information

• Processed, Container List & Preliminary inventory by Jonathan Dembo, with the assistance of Krystal Cook, Saundra Pinkham, & Dick Wolfe 7/12/2010; revised 11/19/2010; Final inventory by Krystal Cook, revised 2/16/2011; revised by Douglas Tuers, 4/27/2011; Finding aid by Jonathan Dembo, 1/23/2012, revised 6/11/2012; Encoded by Jonathan Dembo, 7/9/2012; Encoding revised by Jonathan Dembo, 7/18/2012.

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky. He attended Vanderbilt, Oxford, Yale, and the University of California Berkeley. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for poetry, and one for the novel All The King’s Men. He was the first Poet Laureate of the United States and was awarded the Presidential Medal of freedom. In the summer of 1929, he secretly married Emma Brescia. The marriage ended in divorce in 1951. On 7 December 1952, he married again to the travel writer Eleanor Clark Warren (6 July 1913 – 16 February 1996). The couple had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren and Gabriel Penn Warren. The collection includes numerous references to Warren’s second family and includes copies of Mrs. Warren’s works.

Warren was an unusually versatile writer who was successful in numerous forms of literature, including poetry, drama, short stories, novels and literary criticism. Writing about his native South, Warren achieved international recognition and distinction in each of these forms but it is as a poet, critic, and novelist that he was most widely known.

Warren produced 10 novels and a collection of short stories, The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories (1948). By far the most successful of his novels was All The King's Men (1946), the story of a southern politician and demagogue named Willie Stark, who was loosely modeled on Huey Long of Louisiana. Warren was considered one of the most influential of the New Critics, who had great influence on the teaching of literature in American schools and universities during the late 1940s and 1950s. All The King's Men epitomized what literature should be in New Critical terms---a complicated but highly readable narrative filled with irony and ambiguity and was widely used in courses on modern fiction. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Southern Authors Award in 1947.

In later years, Warren wrote more loosely told stories about dramatic and romantic subjects, such as the interracial theme of Band of Angels (1955) or the natural disasters of The Cave (1959) and Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964). Warren's poetry was intellectual, filled with powerful images, and rooted in the pre-Civil War South. He continued to write impressive poetry almost until the time of his death, in 1989.

Stuart Wright

The Robert Penn Warren Papers were collected and compiled by Stuart T. Wright. Wright was born on 30 March 1948 in Roxboro, North Carolina. He was the son of Frances Critcher Wright (1919-2010) and Wallace Lyndon Wright (1921-1965). An avid reader as a boy, Wright developed a strong interest in the American Civil War and with his father toured many of the war’s battlefields searching for artifacts and studying the history of the era. At the age of 12, he won a statewide “Johnny Reb” essay contest and by the age of 15 had visited every major battlefield of the Civil War. Wright attended Roxboro High School, from which he graduated in 1966. It was during these years that he developed an interest in collecting historical books and manuscripts and began relationships with a number of local collectors and dealers.

In the fall of 1966, Wright enrolled at Wake Forest University as a pre-med, history, German and music student. Wright earned a B.A. in German and music in 1970. As a graduate student at Wake Forest University, Wright focused his studies on Southern history and literature, his ambition being to build an authoritative Southern Studies collection for the university. He received a master's degree in Southern Studies in 1973 and a second master's degree in U.S. History in 1980. Additionally Wright holds a professional degree from England in a medically related field. It was while studying there that he became interested in Thomas Wolfe, the noted North Carolina native and novelist.

Following his graduation from Wake Forest, Wright began to develop his collections more systematically, acquiring many first editions of Southern writers. In 1976 he began teaching at Reynolda House, a Wake Forest University affiliate dedicated to the arts and arts education. Wright taught classes in American music as well as human anatomy for art students. In 1978 Wright became Lecturer in Education at Wake Forest University. During his 10 years teaching at Wake Forest University, Wright authored numerous works of Civil War and North Carolina history, and dozens of articles, bibliographies, essays and reviews on Southern literature and the writers whose papers he collected. In addition, he developed a strong interest in the writings of the English poet Donald Davie and the Minnesota-born poet Richard Eberhart, whose works he also collected.

At the same time, Wright also began a career as a publisher by starting Palaemon Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. By 1984, Palaemon Press had produced 316 titles, consisting mainly of broadsides and limited editions, of the poetry and essays of such Southern writers as A. R. Ammons, Fred Chappell, James Dickey, William Goyen, George Garrett, and Eudora Welty. He also built comprehensive collections and compiled book-length descriptive bibliographies of A.R. Ammons, Andrew Lytle, Reynolds Price, James Dickey, William Goyen, Walker Percy, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, George Garrett, Richard Eberhart, and Donald Davie. As well as serving as editor of the contemporary literature section of the Bulletin of Bibliography throughout the 1980s, Wright also contributed pioneering checklists of the writings of Southern poets Henry Taylor, Charles Wright, and Robert Morgan. For Meckler Publishing he served as series editor for a number of book-length bibliographies and checklists. In recognition of these accomplishments, when he was just 32, Wright was elected to membership in New York's prestigious Grolier Club.

All of these works are represented in the Stuart Wright Collection. In his dealings with these various authors Wright made consistent efforts to acquire personal papers, letters and documents, photographs, manuscripts, drafts, proofs, and published materials to supplement his continuing activities as a purchaser of their works. In this way, Wright acquired perhaps a majority of his overall collection. Over the years a number of biographers used Wright’s collection to aid their research. For example, James A. Grimshaw, Jr. used the collection extensively for his Robert Penn Warren: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1922-1979 published by the University Press of Virginia, in 1981 and Craig S. Abbott did so as well for John Crowe Ransom: A Descriptive Bibliography, published by Whitston Publishing Company, Inc. in 1999. Joseph Blotner also used the Wright collection in researching Robert Penn Warren: A Biography, published by Random House in 1997.

Nevertheless, from the mid- to late 1980s, Wright began to look for a permanent home for his collection, which he felt had grown too large and yet had been too little used. Unable to find a repository willing to accept the entire collection under suitable conditions, he sold a number of individual author collections to Vanderbilt University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Emory University. It was not until 2010 that he reached agreement to house the remaining, and largest part of his collection at East Carolina University. The Stuart Wright Collection in the East Carolina Manuscript Collection of J.Y. Joyner Library includes 22 sub-collections of the papers of Southern American writers. The related Stuart Wright Book Collection holds several thousand volumes by or about many of the same writers. Many of these volumes contain annotations, inscriptions, and insertions that reveal much about the authors in the collection and their relationships with one another. In 1998 Wright moved to England, and since 2001 he has resided in the medieval market town of Ludlow, in Shropshire.

The Robert Penn Warren Papers consists of eighteen archival boxes and three oversized folders of manuscript materials, 1885-1990, and including some undated materials. The collection contains approximately 9.65 cubic feet of manuscript materials in 18 archival containers and 3 oversized folders. The bulk of the material dates from 1940 to 1989.

The collection is arranged in its original order, except as noted below, in eight series, including correspondence, typescripts and holographic materials, literary essays and notes, poems, uncorrected and edited proofs, loose manuscripts transferred from the Stuart Wright Book Collection, audio recordings, and oversized materials.

More than a third of the collection (six boxes) consists of typescripts and holographic materials of Warren’s published and unpublished works, including nineteen versions of Portrait of a Father, his biography of his father written during 1988.

The loose manuscripts transferred from the Stuart Wright Book Collection are an heterogeneous mix of items found in the pages of Warren-related books collected by Stuart Wright from various sources. These items include correspondence, clippings, ephemera, photographic prints, printed materials, among a wide variety of other materials. The loose manuscripts are linked to the book of origin by their Stuart Wright Book Collection Number (e.g. Stuart Wright Book Collection #38.4)

Series 1: Correspondence consists of Robert Penn Warren’s correspondence, 1946-1986, with Louis Daniel Brodsky, Fred Chappell, John Ciardi, George Garrett, Bernard Malamud, David Sladen, and George White. It consists primarily of autograph and typed latters signed. Series one is held in Box 1.a – 1.k

Series 2: Typescripts and Holograph Materials consists of edited speeches and manuscripts, 1930-1988. It consists primarily of holographs, typescripts and edited typescripts. Most notably it contains 19 versions of Portrait of a Father, Warren’s biography of his father written during 1988. Series two is contained in Box 1.l - 6.t.

Series 3: Literary Essays and Notes consists of literary essays and notes written by Robert Penn Warren on literary subjects and the works of notable American and British authors, 1942-1986. It contains holograph, typescript, and photocopied materials. Series three is held in Box 7.a – 10.y

Series 4: Poems consists of typescripts, photocopies, and clippings of poems by Robert Penn Warren. 1940-1989. This series also contains one uncorrected proof of a broadside of the poem The Flower: A Poem (1981). Series four is held in Folder 011.a – 012.u

Series 5: Uncorrected and Edited Proofs consists of manuscripts of essays written by Robert Penn Warren and others that publishers sent to him for his comments, 1950-1987. A number of these were transferred from the Stuart Wright Book Collection. These items are linked to the book of origin by their Stuart Wright Book Collection Number (e.g. Stuart Wright Book Collection #38.04). Folder 012.y – 016.c

Series 6: Loose Manuscripts Transferred from Stuart Wright Book Collection consists of loose letters, contracts, and annotated poems by, to, or about Robert Penn Warren, 1885-1986, transferred from books in the Stuart Wright Book Collection. The loose manuscripts are linked to the book of origin by their Stuart Wright Book Collection Number (e.g. Stuart Wright Book Collection #38.04). Folder 016.d – 017.zzk

Series 7: Audio Recordings consists of three, reel-to-reel, audio recordings by or about Robert Penn Warren, ca. 1961, including Conversations on the Craft of Poetry with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke; it also contains a recording by Yale University of Warren reading his poetry. Also available in each folder are digital copies of each audio recording on compact disc made by J. Y. Joyner Library, 3/28/2012. Folder 018.a – 018.c

Series 8: Oversized Materials consists of three oversized folders. The first contains the photocopied edited proof of New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren; the second contains a broadside of Warren’s unpublished poem Whip-Poor-Will (2011) Number 41 of 150 "printed with permission of the literary estate of Robert Penn Warren at Somnambulist Tango Press for the opening of 'Stuart Wright: A Life in Collecting,' the inaugural exhibit from the Stuart Wright Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, September 7, 2011." See also: #1169-014.11.h; the third folder contains three black & white photographic portraits of Robert Penn Warren. Folder 011.h.os.1 – 017.q.os.2.

Note to Researchers: Series 6: Loose Manuscripts Transferred from Stuart Wright Book Collection consists of loose letters, contracts, and annotated poems by, to, or about Robert Penn Warren, 1885-1986, transferred from books in the Stuart Wright Book Collection. The loose manuscripts are linked to the book of origin by their Stuart Wright Book Collection Number (e.g. Stuart Wright Book Collection #38.04). Folder 016.d – 017.zzk

• Guide to the Robert Penn Warren Papers (YCAL MSS 51) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University Library, New Haven, CT USA
• Guide to the Robert Penn Warren Papers (YCAL MSS 51) Robert Penn Warren papers, 1916-1967, 1M78M1, Special Collections, University of Kentucky, Louisville, KY USA
• The Robert Penn Warren Photographic Collection, 81PA104, Special Collections, University of Kentucky, Louisville, KY USA
• Reid and Susan Overcash Literary Collection - A. R. Ammons Papers (#1096-001) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Madison Smartt Bell Papers (#1169-001) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Fred Chappell Papers (#1169-017) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Richard Ghormley Eberhart Papers (#1169-004) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Randall Jarrell Papers (#1169-005) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Katherine Anne Porter Papers (#1169-009) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – John Crowe Ransom Papers (#1169-010) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA
• Stuart Wright Collection – Peter Hillsman Taylor Papers (#1169-013) Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC USA

Jump to a section?

• Series 1 Correspondence
• Series 2 Typescript and Holograph Materials
• Series 3 Literary Essays and Notes
• Series 4 Poems
• Series 5 Uncorrected and Edited Proofs
• Series 6 Loose Manuscripts Transferred from Stuart Wright Book Collection
• Series 7 Audio Recordings
• Series 8 Oversized Materials

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