Collections : [Yale University -Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]

The C. D. Wright papers consists of correspondence, writings, notebooks, and printed and other material relating chiefly to Wright's literary and professional activities. There is correspondence from writers, artists, literary scholars, family, and friends. Named correspondents include Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, W. S. Merwin, Michael Ondaatje, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Marjorie Welish, and Elizabeth Willis, among others. The writings include drafts, proofs, and other material for several works dating from the 1990s onward. Works include: Tremble (1996), DeepStep Come Shining (1998), Steal Away (2002), One Big Step (2003), Cooling Time (2005), and Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008). Other materials found in the collection include: notebooks and research material; printed material, including clippings, publicity, reviews, and issues of journals; computer files, including drafts of writings and copies of email; audiovisual materials, including sound recordings and photographs; records of the journal Lost Roads; legal records, including contracts and permissions; and documentation relating to other literary and academic matters, such as awards, conferences and other events, and blurbs and recommendations.

The Cecile Starr Papers Relating to Mary Ellen Bute consist of Starr's research files on the filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute and audiovisual recordings of and about Bute. The papers document Starr's research and fundraising to produce a documentary film about Bute (never completed) as well as Starr's work to publicize and distribute Bute's films, especially after Bute's death.

The papers contain writings, correspondence, personal papers, photographs, and family papers of twentieth-century American writer Chard Powers Smith. The collection documents his career through drafts of his writings and through correspondence that reveals his personal and professional relationships with fellow writers, publishers, and literary organizations. The papers also contain information about his family, documenting not only his relationships with family members but also the lives of his parents and grandparents in nineteenth-century Watertown, New York. Smith's experiences during World War I and his travels in Europe in the 1920s are documented through correspondence, autobiographical writings, photographs, and scrapbooks. His involvement with the Distributist and Agrarian movements of the 1930s is evidenced by correspondence, writings, and printed ephemera, and the collection also documents his involvement with the Society of Friends, or Quakers, particularly from the 1950s through the end of his life.

The collection consists primarily of material created and accumulated by Charles Fenton in the course of researching and writing books on Stephen Vincent Benét and Ernest Hemingway. Research material includes correspondence about Benét and Hemingway, Fenton's notes about their lives and careers, and index cards with which Fenton organized his research. In addition to research on Benét and Hemingway, the collection contains a smaller amount of research material on the topic of "Writer in America" and the history of The National Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as notes regarding Fenton's World War II anthology and notes on American writers. The collection also contains professional and personal papers, including manuscripts and teaching materials from Fenton's years as a lecturer at Duke University.

The collection contains seventeen notebooks from Bristed's undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale and Cambridge universities from the late 1830s to mid 1840s, chiefly on classical authors and texts, including translations, and mathematics, as well as a catalog of his books, several letters, a diary, a receipt, and two printed books, including Bristed's Anacreontics, published under the pseudonym Carl Benson.

The papers contain correspondence and military papers documenting the military career of Charles Dimon in 1864-65.

The papers document the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiography of General George Armstrong Custer and the Little Big Horn Battle. The collection contains research material consisting of correspondence, notes, writings, photoprints and maps. There is some original nineteenth centry material related to Custer, in particular the correspondence of Edward Settle Godfrey, but most of the papers are reproductions of original primary material.

The Charles F. Kindred and Sarah E. Kindred Papers, which span from circa 1870-1918, contain correspondence, mortgages, land deeds, maps, tax bills, business ledgers, printed material, legal papers, and other personal papers relating to Charles F. Kindred, Sarah E. Kindred, and their real estate dealings in Minnesota and North Dakota.