Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, notebooks for 1926 through 1932, financial documents, certificates, and pictorial works. The manuscripts and typescripts include essays and drafts of essays, drafts of novels, stories, notes for work, articles, criticism, poems, and a bibliography of his work. The correspondence, dating from 1967 to 1972, includes letters from the author to his parents Ernest Brooks and Mabel Clark Sansom, to Leonard Clark, and to Lola L. Szladits, as well as letters from Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley to the author. Also present is a letter relating to the author's son from Sir Basil Zaharoff to Ernest Brooks Sansom. There are letters to William Sansom from Arturo Barea, Elizabeth Bowen, Michael Braude, Norman Cameron, Dorothy K. Haynes, Michael Meyer, William Plomer, Michael Powell, Progress Publishing Company, John Sommerfield, the J. Walter Thompson Company, Arthur Waley, and others, dating from 1934 to 1966.
The William Sansom collection of papers are arranged in five series: