Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts and typescripts, notebooks, legal and financial documents, correspondence, portraits, and pictorial works. The pictorical works include sketches by the author, some for his bookplate; by E. D. Wintle and F. C. Macrae to illustrate Kipling's works, and Florence Garrard's sketchbook. The manuscripts include holographs for Kipling's poems and stories. Holdings include typescripts with Kipling's holograph emendations of plays and letters, as well as manuscripts and typescripts related to Kipling's works by J. M. Barrie, F. L. Cowles, W. A. Fraser, Randall Jarrell, Booth Tarkington, and A. P. Watt & Son. The legal documents include royalty statements from 1912 to 1916 and an affidavit in the case of Rudyard Kipling vs. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Also included are a number of notebooks containing the author's poems and short stories, two of which are dated 1882 and 1887 respectively, the remaining notebooks are undated. The correspondence include letters from 1888 to 1936 written by Kipling to Edgar Bateman, William Canton, Miss A. Clifford, Ford Madox Ford, Edmund Gosse, Ripley Hitchcock, Charles Eliot Norton, A. P. Watt & Son, and others. The correspondence also includes letters about Kipling written between 1899 and 1956 from Maude Adams to A. P. Watt & Son; from Willa Cather to Mr. Zoltan Engel; from Doubleday, Page & Co. to A. P. Watt & Son; from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the secretary of the Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers; and from others relating to Kipling's works. There are letters to Kipling from George Cram Cook, Randolph Lewis, Lady Ebba Cecilia (Bystrom) Low, Archibald Marshall, A. P. Watt and Son, and others dating from 1879 to 1935.
The Rudyard Kipling collection of papers are arranged in two series: