American Literature

In December 1982, Milton F. Barlow of Kansas City donated his Mark Twain collection to the library. Some sixty books in all, the collection was made up mainly of first editions of Twain, such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog, his anti-vivisection tract The Pains of Lowly Life and the very ephemeral Speech on Accident Insurance, his appearance in periodicals such as the December 1866 issue of Harper's which contains Mark Swain's [!] "Forty-three Days in an Open Boat", and even a piracy, the Toronto edition of The Prince and the Pauper with its pointed preface justifying piracy. In addition it included the typescript of the first ten chapters—the eleventh and last is at the Bancroft Library—of "Tom Sawyer, Detective". A notable piece of supporting material was Merle Johnson's interleaved copy of his A Bibliography of the Work of Mark Twain, 1910, with many manuscript additions. One unexpected consequence of Mr. Barlow's gift was the discovery that the library already owned far more than we had realized of Mark Twain's works, some five dozen items, including a copy of his 1873 patent for an improvement in scrapbooks and an example of the scrapbook itself. One of the University's most generous donors was Sallie Casey Thayer, remembered chiefly for her donations of art to the infant KU Museum of Art but also a benefactor of the library. Her copy of the second printing of Tom remains our earliest despite serious searching for the first printing, which we feel Mr. Barlow's standards require must be in the original cloth.

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Elizabeth Morrison Snyder of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, began her Mencken collection in 1951 with the acquisition of a substantial collection of letters from H.L. Mencken to Charles B. Driscoll (an alumnus of the University of Kansas and once the editor of the Wichita Eagle) and a group of inscribed editions of Mencken's works, including a fine set of the American Mercury with Driscoll's bookplates, from Driscoll's library. In the two decades which followed, working with Herbert West, Allen Schultz of Smith's Bookstore in Baltimore, John Van E. Kohn, Jake Zeitlin, and other booksellers, she built a collection of remarkable balance and completeness, with some 250 Mencken letters, 75 inscribed editions of his books, files of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, and an extensive collection of ephemera written and published by Mencken. Presented to the Library in 1971 and increased since by further gifts from Mrs. Snyder, the Mencken collection includes such rarities as Ventures into Verse of 1903 (two of the 37 known copies), George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905), A Little Book in C Major (1916), and extensive files of Mencken's newspaper columns. 

Mrs. Snyder is also the founder and supporter of the Snyder Student Bookcollecting Contest, a competition first announced in 1957. Many of the alumni of this student contest are now still collecting and some came home two years ago to help Mrs. Snyder celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the contest.

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Begun in 1963 by Terrence Williams, then a member of the department, and Edward F. Grier, professor of English (to whom we are also indebted for his development of our Walt Whitman holdings), with the intention of preserving the ephemeral productions of the local anti-establishment poets, the New American Poetry collection has solidified under the attentions of Robert W. Melton, the KU Libraries' English and American literature bibliographer, into the collection of a particular set of movements in contemporary American poetry. Often taking a fugitive and fragile form but sometimes coming out as fashionable limited editions, the publications stem mainly from four schools: the Black Mountain College group, the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York "Beats", and the Kansas Connection. The several thousand items of the collection include issues of over 500 separate little magazines and the productions of many small presses, including Terrence Williams' own. While attempting to provide as broad and representative a selection as possible, we place special emphasis on poets who have had some connection with the local scene—Kansas poets such as Michael McClure, Charles Plymell, Ken Irby, William Stafford, Ronald Johnson, and the adopted Kansan, William Burroughs, and frequent visitors such as Allen Ginsberg. The most recent addition of a Kansas poet to the collections is the library of Max Douglas, a promising young KU poet who died in 1970 at the age of 21. The Douglas Collection, presented to the Library by the poet's father in 1982, is strong in the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, and includes Douglas' own posthumously published poems.

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The department also collects the manuscripts and papers of post-World War II American poets, not all writing in the same genres as those of the New American Poetry collection although our strongest holdings do come from those schools. We have, for example, letters of Allen Ginsberg, large groups of the papers of Ronald Johnson and of William Burroughs, and notebooks of Gregory Corso. Three who do not fall into those categories are Robert Peters, an academic and dramatic poet working in the Los Angeles area, whose papers (acquired through funds from the English Department) include massive correspondence with almost every American poet working today, Larry Eigner, and Kirby Congdon, who designated the library the official archives of his papers years ago and sends frequent shipments of his work.