Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, notebooks dating from 1932 to 1966, financial documents, and portraits. The manuscripts and typescripts include stories, poems, notes for work, and essays, as well as manuscripts transcribed by Spender, and typescripts with Spender's manuscript emendations. There is correspondence, dating from 1931 to 1973, from the author to W. H. Auden, Kenneth Burke, Rupert Doone, Anne Fremantle, Howard Griffin, Geoffrey Grigson, Randall Jarrell, Sir Edward Howard Marsh, Philip O'Connor, Michael Roberts, Edward Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Witt-Diamant, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Also present are letters relating to the author, dating from [ca. 1937] to 1975, between various correspondents including Christopher Isherwood, Henry Miller, Herbert Mitgang, Dylan Thomas, Hugh Walpole, Virginia Woolf, and others. There are letters to Spender from W. H. Auden, Chester Kallman, Peter H. Salus, Edith Sitwell, and the editors, John Bagguley and Cecil Woolf, dating from [1928] to [1973].
The Stephen Spender collection of papers are arranged in four series: