Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Our manuscript collections document a broad range of human thought and experience. Specialty areas include Irish literature, British and American literature between the World Wars, American philosophy and southern Illinois history and photography.
Caresse Crosby and her husband Harry founded the Black Sun Press in Paris in 1927. Caresse later owned an art gallery in Washington, D.C., during the Second World War. Her papers include extensive correspondence, photographs and art that reflect her patronage of notable writers and artists in Europe and American from the 1920s into the 1960s.
Other major literary collections include the papers of the American writers Kay Boyle, Bessie Breuer, Edith Summers Kelley, humorist H. Allen Smith, writer-publisher Bob Brown and translator-publisher Samuel Putnam; and the British writers Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell and Richard Aldington. We hold smaller collections related to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Nancy Cunard and the artist-printmaker Philip Kaplan.
John Dewey was a leading figure in 20th century philosophy, a proponent of pragmatism and an educational reformer. His papers and those of philosophers in his orbit, such as Paul Weiss, Elsie Ripley Clapp, Joseph Ratner and James K. Feibleman, draw scholars from around the world, as does the library's Center for Dewey Studies.
The Open Court Publishing Company was founded in 1887 by German immigrants in La Salle, Illinois, to provide a forum for the discussion of philosophy, science, and religion, and to make philosophical classics widely available by making them affordable. It also published the quarterly journals Open Court and The Monist. The extensive business and editorial records date back to the firm's beginning.
The Library of Living Philosophers papers document the editorial history of the Library under the editorship of the founder-editor, Paul Arthur Schilpp, for the period 1938 to 1981.
Two large collections document the intersection of religious and secular thought in the mid-20th century. The Christian Century Magazine records include correspondence between editors and contributors on key issues from Civil Rights to the Cold War. The Edwin H. Wilson Papers of the American Humanist Association cover similar issues of the day from a humanist and civil liberties perspective.
The Harley K. Croessmann Collection of James Joyce includes letters of Joyce and his biographer Herbert Gorman that shed light on early Joyce scholarship. Croessmann also collected photographs, art works and correspondence and manuscripts of other notable Irish writers, including W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.
Writing under the pen names of Flann O'Brien (At-Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) and Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan was a key figure in mid-20th century Irish literature.
Other Irish literature collections include the papers of Lennox Robinson, Katherine Tynan Hinkson and the mid-20th century journals Envoy and The Holy Door.
Erwin Piscator was a German Expressionist director who, with Bertolt Brecht, originated the epic theater movement. His papers include the records of his Dramatic Workshop at the New School in New York City, a training ground for such actors as Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Bea Arthur, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau and (briefly) Marlon Brando.
Other theater collections include the papers of playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson; set designer Mordecai Gorelik; the Sherman Theater collection, featuring hundreds of scripts--often pirated--of popular plays from the late 19th and early 20th centuries; programs and other records of the Unity Theatre of Great Britain; programs and records from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; and collections of research into in the careers of African-American actors Paul Robeson and Ira Aldridge.
Our Civil War collections include the letters of southern Illinois soldiers from all ranks and walks of life, including Edwin Loosley, an English-born baker who survived the worst fighting of the Vicksburg campaign; Joseph Skipworth, a farmer in John A. Logan's 31st Illinois Infantry who fought from the Battle of Belmont (1861) through Sherman's March to the Sea; John Mann and Ben Wiley, two members of the 5th Illinois Cavalry, along with letters of their wives Nancy and Emily at home; and Irish-born Michael Lawler, a Mexican War veteran and colonel of the 18th Illinois Infantry, who rose to brigadier-general.
Our Ralph E. McCoy Collection of the Freedom of the Press features thousands of books and pamphlets gathered by and for our first library director. This collection is complemented by the papers of Theodore Schroeder, a lawyer and free speech advocate who defended many prosecuted under the Comstock Act. Schroeder in turn preserved the papers of Ida Craddock, an early marriage counselor who was prosecuted for mailing pamphlets on sex education. The First Amendment also features the papers of John Howard Lawson, imprisoned as one of the Hollywood Ten, and in the correspondence of attorney Elmer Gertz, who defended Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer in a celebrated obscenity case.
The history of Carbondale and the surrounding region is chronicled in the papers of prominent families, local churches and businesses such as the Trovillion Private Press, featuring correspondence with fine press enthusiasts from around the U.S. and overseas. The John E. Jones papers examine the region's coal mining legacy from the perspective of a veteran miner and safety inspector. The John G. Mulcaster papers reflect the historiography of the Trail of Tears at the time of its centennial.
To complement our 20th century literature holdings we have gathered many collections of letters from soldiers in the First World War, mostly American and German, with some British soldiers. German WWI scholars will find a rich, untapped field of research in our holdings. Our collections also reflect an interest in WWI aviation. The Second World War is highlighted by our collection of the war letters of Kay Boyle and her husband Joseph Franckenstein, an Austrian baron and anti-Nazi who joined an American mountain regiment and later parachuted into France with the O.S.S.
C. William "Doc" Horrell was a longtime SIU photographer and professor. His extensive collection of negatives, slides and prints documents all aspects of life in southern Illinois during the mid-20th century, with a special emphasis on coal mining. Other important photograph collections chronicle the 1937 Ohio River Flood, the devastating Tri-State Tornado of 1925 and the William Planert collection of the American Expedition to Siberia at the close of WWI. The Caresse Crosby photographs chronicle her marriage to Harry Crosby and their ties to writers and artists from the 1920s to the 1960s, including Kay Boyle, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Salvador Dali and Gregory Corso.