The collection consists of research material, writings, correspondence, audiocassettes, printed material, personal papers, financial papers, photographs, and other papers, documenting the work of James R. Mellow as an art critic, a book reviewer, and a literary biographer, shedding particular light on his biographies of Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Walker Evans.