The collection contains sixty-three sketches, drawings, paintings, and prints acquired by Yale faculty member Norman Holmes Pearson not for their aesthetic or artistic merit, but because they were created by poets and other authors; he titled his collection "Art for the Wrong Reason." The works were executed in crayon, gouache, graphite, ink, charcoal, oil, and watercolor on paper, board, canvas, and panel, by fifty-three writers including E. E. Cummings, George Du Maurier, Victor Hugo, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Anne Porter, with multiple works by John Dos Passos, H. D., Herman Hesse, Denise Levertov, Wyndham Lewis, John Masefield, Henry Miller, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Among the drawings are portraits, self-portraits, or caricatures of G. K. Chesterton, Hugh Hefner, Henry Miller, J. M. Mitchison, Norman Holmes Pearson, Bernard Shaw, and Osbert Sitwell.