Manuscript Collections

The Manuscripts section includes personal and family papers, business and institutional records, and over 80 photograph collections.  Manuscripts and Rare Book collections complement one another to form research specialty areas.  These include:

• American Philosophy, including the papers of John Dewey, the archives of the Open Court press, Christian Century Magazine, the Library of Living Philosophers, and the papers and libraries of other individual philosophers and philosophical organizations.
• First Amendment Freedoms and censorship issues, in the papers of Theodore Schroeder, John Howard Lawson, and several collections relating to Henry Miller.
• Twentieth Century American and British Literature, notably from the period between World War I and II, including Richard Aldington, Kay Boyle, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence, and others.
• Irish Studies, centered around James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Lennox Robinson and the Abbey Theatre, Brian O'Nolan, Katharine Tynan Hinkson, and Francis Stuart.
• Theater, in the papers of Erwin Piscator, Mordecai Gorelik and Marjorie Lawrence, the records of Dublin's Abbey Theatre and Great Britain's Unity Theatre, and the American Sherman Theatre Collection of melodrama play scripts.
• World War I, in dozens of collections of diaries, letters, postcards, and photographs documenting the service of individual soldiers from Illinois and elsewhere in the United States, as well as Great Britain and Germany.
  
• Southern Illinois history and culture, including the papers and records of historian and educator John Willis Allen, the Rickert, Simonds, and Mann families, and local organizations and institutions, such as the First Presbyterian Church of Carbondale  H.O.M.E (Honor Our Men's Efforts), the Trovillion Private Press, and the Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship.

To make a gift or donation to the manuscripts unit of the Special Collections Research Center, please visit the Donating and Giving page.