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Correspondence, manuscripts, notes, notebooks, documents, photographs, course-related materials, and printed materials. The manuscripts include typescripts of Sykes' published and unpublished novels, monographs, plays, short stories, and articles. Among these are The Perennial Avant Garde, The Cool Millennium, and The Hidden Remnant. Sykes' notes and notebooks span the period from the early 1930s to 1980, and include preliminary ideas and sketches for his books, as well as autobiographical material. A small number of documents concern Sykes' wartime work in the U.S. Government Office of War Information. Course-related material including writings and correspondence of students taught by Sykes between 1962 and 1975 at the New School and as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Printed materials consist of numerous reviews of Sykes' books, in addition to offprints and articles by Sykes. Included as well are printed materials about or connected with Sykes, offprints of articles inscribed to him, and many volumes from his library. The substantial correspondence series includes personal letters and correspondence with agents and publishers relating to his books. Correspondents include Harold Clurman, Aaron Copland, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Francis Steegmuller, as well as a number of Sykes' students. There is extensive correspondence between Sykes and the artist John Hartell from 1927 to 1983.

A group of literary manuscripts, including three letters written to Professor Robert Gorham Davis by Ezra Pound, the holograph draft by Dorothy Parker of her address delivered at the Esquire Magazine Symposium in October 1958, and two manuscripts of James T. Farrell, one containing holograph drafts of poems, and the other being a carbon copy typescript of various chapters from WHAT TIME COLLECTS. Also, approximately 65 letters from Ella Winter in the late 1930s, discussing politics, writing, and their social circle; approximately 25 letters from Laura Riding written in the late 1970s on language and, in particular, her book RATIONAL DEFINITION; and letters from James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Richard Rovere, and others.