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The collection includes correspondence, writings and research material, photographs, printed material, and personal papers relating to American author Bernard Wolfe. There is correspondence, including incoming and outgoing letters, with family, friends, writers, publishers, editors, and labor organizations. Individual corrrespondents include: Pearl Buck, Marcel Duhamel, Dwight MacDonald, Henry Miller, A. J. Muste, John Crowe Ranson, Harry Ross, and Wolfe's brother Albert; there is a third-party letter from Frida Kahlo to Leon Trotsky. Writings include corrected drafts of Wolfe's best-known novels, the science-fiction work Limbo (1952) and The Great Prince Died (1959), which was based on Trotsky's assassination. Other works include an "Outline for a Study of the Role of the Negro in American Popular Culture," essays on Connecticut labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and short fiction, some of which was published in Playboy in the 1960s. There are photographs, circa 1937, of Wolfe, Trotsky, Trotsky's wife Natalia Sedova, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Max Shachtman, and others. Printed materials include research material relating to Thomas Mann, clippings, and ephemera.

The collection consists of proofs and "first reader reports" that document a component of the selection process for titles that became Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The proofs are pre-publication copies of manuscripts, used by Book-of-the-Month Club judges to select titles. The reports comprise reviews by in-house editors and outside readers of manuscripts under consideration for publication. They were written by a wide variety of individuals including Rosemary Benet, Basil Davenport, Elizabeth Wynne Easton, Roger Pippett, John Sherry, Russell Thacher, Ralph Thompson, and Leon Wilson.

The collection contains correspondence, writings, and personal papers relating to Brendan Gill, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from the late 1930s through the 1990s. In addition to professional correspondence, there are letters between Gill and his wife Anne Barnard and other family members. Writings include materials relating to Gill's shorter works, written for The New Yorker and other magazines, and to several of his books, including two early novels, The Trouble of One House (1950) and The Day the Money Stopped (1957), a memoir, Here at the New Yorker (1975), and biographical works, Tallulah (1972), Lindbergh Alone (1980), and Many Masks (1987). Materials include drafts, proofs, research materials, artwork and photographs relating to works, and clippings (reviews). The collection also contains a considerable amount of personal and family records, including diaries, passports, photograph albums, and scrapbooks.

The collection consists of correspondence, writings, personal and financial papers, subject files, photographs, printed materials, and audiovisual materials. Bruce Nugent's correspondence consists of family, professional, and personal correspondence, including letters from homosexual love interests. Writings include poetry, short non-fiction pieces, and various fiction pieces, including the novel Gentleman Jigger. Writings by others include drafts and papers relating to Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance by Thomas H. Wirth. Photographs consist of portraits and snapshots of Nugent, his love interests, friends, and family. The bulk of the audiovisual materials consist of interviews with Nugent. Printed materials include books inscribed to Nugent as well as various clippings and ephemera.

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 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 correspondence, research and teaching files, and personal papers documenting the life of American academic Charles T. Davis. Correspondents feature literary scholars and African-American artists, writers, and cultural figures, including Doris Alexander, Anthony Appiah, Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, John Blassingame, Michel Fabre, Leon Forrest, Athol Fugard, Henry Louis Gates, Leon Higginbotham, Ishmael Reed, Jean Toomer, and others. Correspondents also include colleagues and students. Research and Teaching Files contain files documenting Davis's professional activity as an academic at various institutions from the 1950s through 1970s. Research files include notes and subject files on 19th and 20th century writers and African-American history, literature, and culture. Teaching files include course and lecture notes, writings by Davis and others, and administrative files. Personal papers consists of various other materials, including family papers, audiovisual material, and military and academic records.

The collection consists of correspondence, writings, personal papers, and printed material documenting the career of Clarence Shepard Day. The collection provides insight into Day's work as an author, illustrator, and humorist, who often poked fun at upper class New Yorkers. The collection also documents Day's experience as an undergraduate student at Yale University in the late nineteenth-century. Correspondents include: Alfred A. Knopf and Vira Whitehouse.