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W. Albert Rill (1910-1996)served in the United States Navy as a communications officer during the Second World War. He saw action at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the course of his military career. The W. Albert Rill World War II papers is mostly comprised of Rill's correspondence with his wife Elizabeth. Included in the collection, however, are numerous illustrations and two children's books that Rill hand-illustrated…

Alice Brown (1857-1948) was born in Hampton Falls, N.H., the daughter of Levi and Elizabeth (Lucas) Brown. She graduated from the Robinson Seminary in Exeter, N.H. in 1876. She worked on the staffs of The Christian Register and Youth’s Companion and by 1884 had begun her long career as a writer of short stories, novels, and plays. She continued publishing into the 1940s. Brown lived in Boston and summered in…

A Children’s book author who wrote "Courage of Sarah Noble" and "Bears of Hemlock Mountain." Both won Newbury Honors. Letter written by Alice Dalgliesh from Salt Box, Brookfield, CT on July 8, 1952 to Thelma Brackett, U.N.H. Librarian. In the letter, Dalgliesh thanks Brackett for her kind words regarding the book The Bears of Hemlock Mountain. She also discusses The Defenders, a book by Nicholas Kalashnikoff, the illustrators Claire and George Louden, and the production of a young people’s…

Willis Boyd Allen was born at Kittery Point, Me., July 9, 1855, attended Boston Latin School, and graduated from Harvard in 1878 and from Boston University Law School with an LL.B. degree in 1881. After practicing law for a short period he retired in 1888 to devote his time to writing. His work appeared in many magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Century, and Scribner's. From 1881 to 1893 he was editor of The…

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a poet, biographer, and essayist who owned a summer home in Dublin, N.H. near the MacDowell Artist's Colony. One page letter (1917) written by Amy Lowell to poet and editor, William Stanley Braithwaite. Lowell describes her lecturing and speaking engagements in N.Y. City and also refers to poet Maxwell Bodenheim.

Annie Adams Fields, author and wife of James T. Fields, was born in Boston, MA in 1834. She traveled extensively with her husband and formed intimate friendships with some of America’s most well-known 19th century writers and intellectuals. She died in 1915, having outlived many of her contemporaries. Twenty letters written by Annie Adams Fields between the years 1882 and 1911. Many of them describe her daily life and travels, and two make passing reference to Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and…

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work. Two letters written in 1970 by Archibald MacLeish from Uphill Farm, Conway, Massachusetts to publisher William Ewert in Concord, N.H. regarding Lawrence Thompson’s biography of Robert Frost. In the letter of October …

The Balch family first came to the United States in 1623 and resided in northern Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The best known member of the family was the author Elizabeth Arabella Balch (1851-1934), daughter of Wesley P. (1794-1856) and Elizabeth Balch (1815-1892). E.A. Balch wrote Glimpses of Old English Homes (1890), and two other works are attributed to her: Mustard Leaves, or Glimpse of London Society …

N.H. printer and poet. Three page letter from Bela Chapin, Claremont, N.H. to George Wadleigh in which Chapin, the compiler of The Poets of New Hampshire, inquires about the life histories of several N.H. poets. He asks Wadleigh about Jeremy Belknap’s hymns, mentions his contact with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, notes his affinity for James T. Fields, Aldrich, and Celia Thaxter, and criticizes the poetry of Robert Boodey Caverly. The letter also includes a list of poets born in N.H. before 1800.

Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, humorist, newspaperman, and poet, was born in Portsmouth, NH in 1814. He moved to Boston, MA in 1833, where he became a journeyman printer. He worked as a printer and editor of several papers, including the Carpet Bag, a humorous weekly, and also authored several works of poetry and prose. He is perhaps best known for the popular tales of his fictional character Mrs. Partington. Three…

Betsey Kaime lived at Canterbury Shaker Village. A 120 page leather-bound book filled with occasional poems written over a period of two years (August 1846-October 1848) at Canterbury Shaker Village.

Tom Burke, a freelance writer, has been a sports writer for over 40 years, covering mostly college hockey. This collection is made up of three series: game summaries; reporter notebooks, miscellaneous published articles.

Writer Harold Witter Bynner (1881-1968) was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1898 he began his studies at Harvard University where he served on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate (1900-1902). After graduating in 1902, Bynner worked for four years as associate editor of McClure’s Magazine before retreating from the pressures of the New York literary world and devoting himself to writing. He was…

Carlton and Margaret (1928-2011) Bradford owned and operated the Kearsarge Bookshelf and Bradford Hallmark in New London, NH for 27 years. They began corresponding with Donald Hall when hosting a poetry reading for him in their store. Margaret died in June of 2011 aged 82. The collection consists primarily of written correspondence between Carlton and Margaret Bradford and Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon…

This series contains issues of the magazine "Celestial Vision" produced by the Student Press at the University of New Hampshire. The magazine contains stories of science fiction, fantasy, horror and science fact.

Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, moving to the United States in 1953. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1962. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad. In 2007 Simic was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. He died in 2023. The collection, which is restricted, consists of correspondence, notebooks,…

Author, poet, and composer. Personal letter to Edmund in Jaffrey, NH on Aug. 16, 1918 in which Aiken mentions the delayed delivery of “papers for T.C.R.” and a review of The Jig of Forshlin.

Cora Watson Lewis was born in Concord, N.H. on November 26, 1858. At age 20, on the death of her mother, she joined her father in Washington, D.C., where he was doing work for former N.H. Governor N.G. Ordway, and took up teaching primary school in the house of the family she boarded with. After two years teaching privately, she moved to Fort Collins in Colorado, where she became the first kindergarten teacher west of the Missouri. Her first job was in a one-room schoolhouse ten miles outside…

E. E. Cummings, 1894-1962, Harvard-educated poet, prose writer, and critic. Seventeen signed letters and postcards from E. E. Cummings, mostly to Seymour Lawrence of the Atlantic Monthly Press. All of the letters and most of the postcards are typescript. Most were mailed from Silver Lake, N.H., where Cummings maintained a home.

Daniel Berkeley Updike, printer and publisher, worked for the Merrymount Press of Boston, Mass. He was a recognized authority on the history and use of print types, and he played an important role in the development and improvement of typography in the United States. Two letters written by Daniel Berkeley Updike to Dr. Locke. In one letter, Updike thanks Locke for providing him with a medical excuse for not carrying…

Daniel Ford was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1931 and moved to New Hampshire in 1946, where he graduated from Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro and, in 1954, from the University of New Hampshire. After a year in England as a Fulbright scholar, he served in the U.S. Army and later worked as a reporter. He returned to New Hampshire to write, working for a time as an editor in the University Publications Office. In…

Professor of English and Director of the Center for New England Culture, University of New Hampshire, Durham. Includes correspondence from Carolyn Chute and Maxine Kumin. The Chute letters talk about the logistics of readings at the University of New Hampshire and thanks Watters for his favorable comments about Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts. Kumin thanks Watters for his reading of her work in his essay “Build Soil” in Shaping the Land We Call New Hampshire.

Donald Babcock was a philosophy professor at the University of New Hampshire. He joined the history department of New Hampshire College (as it was then known) in 1918 and in 1944 created the UNH Philosophy Department, for which he served as chairman and sole professor for most of his remaining tenure. He retired in 1956. The Donald Campbell Babcock papers include correspondence, mostly relating to Babcock’s poetry…

Donald Hall was born in 1928 in Hamden, Connecticut, and attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities. He taught for 19 years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving in 1975 to the family farm on Eagle Pond in Wilmot, New Hampshire with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Hall is the author of sixteen books of poetry, memoirs, essay collections, children’s books, among them the…

Donald Morison Murray (1924-2006) was a Pulitzer Prize winnning journalist, writing teacher, and newspaper columnist. He was a veteran of WWII, professor of the University of New Hampshire, and husband of Minnie Mae (Emmerich) Murray (1920-2005). Donald Murray's collection consists primarily of drafts of written materials related to teaching English rhetoric: textbooks, poetry, newspaper columns, articles, seminar…

Author, printer, and illustrator Letter with envelope written June 4, 1945 by W.A. Dwiggins to Thelma Brackett, U.N.H. Librarian. In the letter Dwiggins thanks Brackett for mentioning his book, Millenium I, in one of her radio broadcasts. Also included with the letter are the pamphlets, The Crew of the Ship Earth and A Technique for Dealing with Artists, both written and illustrated by Dwiggins,…

Author and poet who was born in Henniker, N.H. and wrote "Mountain Maid and other Poems of New Hampshire" A letter sent from Framingham, MA to Amos R. Wells in which Proctor expresses appreciation for Wells’ work in the Authors Club and promises to attend the Club’s meeting whenever she is in Boston.

Edward Morgan Lewis served as president of the University of New Hampshire from September 1, 1927 to May 24, 1936. Lewis received both his undergraduate and graduate education from Williams College. He came to UNH from Massachusetts Agricultural College where he was serving as president. Lewis died in office on May 24, 1936 Letters written by well-known individuals to Edward Morgan Lewis, including: Richard Evelyn…

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), American poet, was born in Head Tide, Maine. He attended Harvard University without taking a degree and later moved to New York. He gained national recognition when President Theodore Roosevelt reviewed the second edition of The Children of the Night in 1905 and began promoting Robinson’s poetry. He won a total of three Pulitzer Prizes over the course of his career. The…

Edwin Francis Edgett (1867-1946) was an author, literary editor of the Boston Evening Transcript and a journalist. Thirteen letters (1918-1934) and published materials sent to Edwin Francis Edgett from various N.H. authors and educators, including Charles Townsend Copeland, Bertha Clark Damon, William Stearns Davis, and Thomas Dreier. The correspondence primarily relates to Edgett’s work for the Boston Evening Transcript, although some of the letters are personal in nature.

American Poet, whose most famous poem was "The Man With The Hoe" which highlighted laborer's hardships. Two broadsides inscribed in 1929 by Edwin Markham to the Book and Scroll Club of U.N.H.: “Lincoln, the Man of the People” – a poem read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 – and “The Man With the Hoe.” Included is a copy of a letter from Ellen F. Adams to William Ewert that explains why she donated these two broadsides to the Dimond Library.

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (1872-1958) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied at Radcliffe, worked as a secretary and teacher at Lowell State Normal School, and wrote poems and short stories. The Eleanor Hallowell Abbott collection primarily contains typescripts of a number of Abbott’s short stories.

Eleanor Wells wrote poetry and articles that she submitted for publication in various magazines. The Eleanor Wells Nudd papers contain correspondence and manuscripts.

Eliphalet Smith (1759-1836) was born in Newmarket, N.H., married Ann Bryant, and later became a successful merchant in Portland, Maine. A 20pp. manuscript containing satirical poems, copies of letters and articles written for local newspapers, and a copy of an erudite letter on the human character.

Elizabeth F. Ellet, (1818-1877), the first American historian of women, was born in upstate New York in October 1818. She became well-known for her collective biographies of women, most notably The Women of the American Revolution (1848). A two page letter to Messrs. Carey and Hart, Publishers of Philadelphia, Pa., in which Ellet discusses the notices she has written for her new book, The Charm. Ellet also comments…

Elizabeth Knowlton, mountaineer and writer, was born October 23, 1895 in Springfield, Massachusetts and began climbing in the White Mountains at age seven. The endeavor which proved central to her life and work was her attempt on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan with the other eight members of the German American Himalayan Expedition in 1932. She was one of the first women ever to reach that elevation. The Knowlton…

Prolific author of children's books who lived in Peterborough, NH. Letter from Elizabeth Yates to Mrs. Prugh informing her that she and Nora Spicer Unwin are unable to speak at a PTA meeting due to prior commitments.

Elizabeth Yates was a prolific American author. In 1938, her first book, High Holiday, was published by London publishing company A & C Black. She is perhaps best known for her 1951 Newbery Medal winning novel Amos Fortune, Free Man. She also received the Newbery Honor in 1944 for Mountain Born. The Road Through Sandwich Notch, with drawings by Nora S. Unwin, was published in Brattleboro, Vt. by Stephen Greene Press in 1973 and was influential in preserving that portion of New Hampshire for…

New Hampshire author who wrote Let Me Show You New Hampshire. A 9 page typescript of The Witch's Cavern, a story about three children who explore a dangerous cave.

Lemcke was an author and resident of New York City. Two letters and a map from Ernest G. Lemcke, which accompany handwritten manuscripts of his three works: Tribal Hidage, or the First English Census; The Early History of the Gervisse, later called West Saxons (494-597); and The Burghal Hidage and the County Hidage; or, the Military Organization of Wessex and of English Mercia against the Danes by about 916 A.D..

Florence Cole [Heckman] of Dover, N.H. graduated from the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts in 1912. In 1909, while still a freshman, she wrote the music to “On to Victory” with words by Professor Richard Whoriskey, the most popular marching and football rally song at the university ever since. She also wrote and produced many plays. The manuscript photocopy of Indian …

Frances Parkinson Keyes was an author, poet and wife of Henry W. Keyes who was Governor of New Hampshire 1917-1919. Three letters from Frances Parkinson Keyes. The first, written in 1917 to Judge von Mosckzisher mentions Robert Frost and Frost’s book Mountain Interval. The second letter, addressed to “Meredith,” mainly discusses a party that she held and Keyes attended in 1952. The third letter, undated and written to “Ina,” thanks her for Christmas gifts and mentions family illnesses.

Printer and publisher located in New York City A letter of thanks to Thelma Brackett, U.N.H. Librarian, from Frederic G. Melcher. Also includes a signed Christmas card and two pamphlets: Faith in Our Times (1955) and On Becoming Acquainted with Books (1962).

Friedrich Sally Grosshut was born in 1906 in Wiesbaden, Germany. His law career came to an abrupt end in 1933 when his Jewish employer, Leo Harry, was forced to leave Wiesbaden. Grosshut himself emigrated to Haifa, Israel. In 1949 he emigrated to the United States, settling in New Jersey. Grosshut's published works include several legal treatises, one a full-length book on the function of emergency laws in a…

Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended Princeton University. After graduation he taught in France, Australia, and Iran, as well as the United States, and was poet-in- residence at several colleges and universities across the country. The Dimond Library began its collection of Kinnell’s papers in 1982 with the acquisition of his correspondence with his friend and mentor, poet…

George Wallis Haven (1808-1895) was a banker and scholar who resided in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Haven served as a director of the Rockingham Bank for forty years, during which time he frequently lectured in Portsmouth. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a personal friend of Haven’s — Haven’s sister Susan married Emerson’s brother William in 1838 — and on at least two occasions (November 20, 1838 and February 10, 1850)…

Son of Thomas Bailey Aldrich who was a New Hampshire-born author and poet. His mother was Mary Elizabeth "Lillian" Woodman. Three page letter from Talbot Bailey Aldrich to Pauline Robinson regarding photos Robinson took of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Of one photo in particular Talbot Bailey Aldrich notes: "Daddy said the one where he is alone is the best that was ever taken of him."

Far East Correspondent for the New York times and author. Transcript with manuscript notes (between 1941-1943) of Hallett Abend's My Life in China, 1926-1941.

Henry Augustus Shute (1856-1943) was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy (1875) and Harvard University (1879). He was born and lived in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he worked as a lawyer and a judge of the municipal court. In 1902 his publication of The Real Diary of a Real Boy gained him national recognition. He went on to write nineteen other books and published extensively in the Saturday Evening Post (1925…

Henry Wilson, author, United States Senator and Vice-President was born in Farmington, NH in 1812. In 1855 he was elected to the United States Senate, and in 1872 he was nominated for Vice-President on the Republican ticket – a position he held until his death in 1875. Wilson devoted his career to the anti-slavery cause and the rights of America’s working class, and he was regarded as one of the “most skilled political organizers” of his day. A two page letter (probably 1872) with envelope…