Search

The files of Curtis Brown, Ltd. literary agency include correspondence with authors, publishers, and other agents and deal with the editing and publishing of trade and textbooks, serial rights, reprints, dramatic rights, translations and foreign rights, promotion and copyright registration. For each author there are contracts, royalty statements, tax statements, and other financial materials. There is also a contract file, including cancellations and related correspondence, from 1914 to 1988. Among the cataloged correspondents are: Louis S. Auchincloss, W.H. Auden, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert Graves, Ogden Nash, Ayn Rand, and Sloan Wilson.

Correspondence, manuscripts, documents, photographs and printed material of the English poet and critic, Edmund Blunden, documenting his personal and professional activity. Blunden's letters to his second wife, Sylva Norman, and his secretary, Aki Hayashi, are particularly well represented. Also included are many letters addressed to Blunden by eminent literary figures such as John Betjeman, George Orwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender, and Henry Williamson. Other literary correspondents are Adrian Bell, Joyce Cary, Richard Church, C. Day Lewis, Walter de la Mare, Graham Greene, H.D., William Plomer, Kathleen Raine, and Leonard Woolf. A substantial portion of the cataloged correspondence contains drawings, verse fragments and poems by Blunden which have been analyzed. Also present are eleven of Blunden's diaries, 1936-1967, which contain drafts of a number of poems. In addition, the collection contains a small number of autograph manuscripts of Edmund Blunden's literary works.

Correspondence, manuscripts, memoranda, contracts and other legal papers, advertising, and printed materials. The files, 1958-1978, of the Harold Matson Company, Inc. include correspondence with authors, publishers, and other agents and deal with the editing and publishing of American and English books, serial rights, reprints, dramatic rights, translations, foreign rights, promotion, and copyright registration. The contract file of McIntosh, McKee & Dodds, Inc. Literary Representatives is also included.

Letters, manuscripts, and books, including four letters from MacNeice to the poet and editor, Geoffrey Grigson. The manuscripts, either by or about MacNeice, include ten of his last poems. Five of these have been published in SOLSTICE, 1961, and four in THE BURNING PERCH, 1963. Drafts of the first group of poems were written in a personal notebook used by the poet while he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In another similar notebook is a partial draft of his play "The Administrator." Both notebooks are in the collection. Also, an untitled, unpublished poem of seven stanzas"Tingling [born] the burning island" written on the reverse of a map. Works about NacNeice include manuscripts of a memoir and a radio portrait by Robert Pocock. The portrait has poignant comments and personal reminiscences by twenty of the poet's contemporaries, including John Betjeman, Anthony Blunt, W.H. Auden, E.R. Dodds, Stephen Spender, and others. Both Auden and a literary coterie of Spender, Betjeman, William Empson, and Cyril Connoly taped disucssions of MacNeice and his poetry. Also, thirty-eight books that were in MacNeice's personal library. Most are autographed by him, and many have marked passages and marginal notes. One of the books, Euripides' ALCESTIS AND OTHER PLAYS, is heavily annotated, apparently for a broadcast production.

Correspondence and manuscripts. The collection includes manuscript drafts and typescripts of two volumes of his autobiography: THE OLD CENTURY AND SEVEN MORE YEARS, 1938; and THE WEALD OF YOUTH, 1942. There are also 13 volumes of early notebooks for the period 1894 until 1909 (from age 8 to 22) containing drafts of over 200 poems, 19 short stories and many drawings. There is some correspondence about the autobiography. Also includes 21 letters from Arnold Bennett, 51 letters from Lady Ottoline Morrell, 26 letters from H.M. Tomlinson, 19 letters from Sassoon to his mother-in-law, Lady Gatty, 22 letters from Sassoon to his son, letters from many others, and a typescript of his poem "A love affair" with holograph note