Found 2 collections related to Derleth, August, 1909-1971

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), poet, novelist, and biographer, was born in Kansas and raised in Illinois. He was admitted to the bar in 1891 and practiced law for many years in Chicago, including a stint with Clarence Darrow, 1903-1911. However, his true vocation was writing; over a period of nearly thirty years he produced more than forty books of poetry and prose, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Vachel Lindsey, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. His most famous work was Spoon River Anthology (1915), first published the previous year as a series of 244 epitaphs in free verse in Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis under the pseudonym Webster Ford. He was married twice, to Helen Jenkins in 1898 and to Ellen Frances Coyne in 1923, and had four children. However, from 1931 to 1944 he lived alone in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City where he became acquainted with Alice Davis (later Tibbetts). Masters died in 1950 in Melrose, Pennsylvania. Collection consists of correspondence, poetry, an extensive journal of Alice Davis's, snapshots, and miscellaneous printed material documenting the relationship between Alice E. Davis (later Tibbetts) and Edgar Lee Masters while they both lived in the Chelsea Hotel. Bulk of the collection consists of letters from Masters to Davis as well as considerable typescript and holograph poetry written by Masters and often dedicated to Davis, 1936-1944. There is also correspondence between Davis and members of Masters's family as well as between Davis and August Derleth, Dorothy Dow, Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, Dudley Nichols, Norman Vincent Peale, and Louis Quarles. In addition, the collection includes Davis's extensive typescript journal covering the early years of her friendship with Masters, 1935-1938. There are also programs, playbills, and clippings pertaining to Masters, particularly to the Broadway production of Spoon River Anthology in 1963 and printed material relating to the Chelsea Hotel. less

Ralph Thompson (1904-1979) was an American author, teacher and editor. He was a book critic at the New York Times and a contributing editor at Time Magazine, wrote reference works and translations, and was editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club from 1951 until 1975. Collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and printed matter relating to Thompson's work. Bulk of the correspondence consists of letters to Thompson mainly from authors and readers of his reviews while he was a book columnist at the New York Times. Also, original manuscripts by Thompson and others, pamphlets on literary works, and photographs of a mountain-climbing expedition to Mount Everest. less