Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

Correspondence; manuscripts of books, chapters, addresses, lectures, articles, and other writings; clippings and other printed materials relating to Butler's life and career, and memorabilia, ca. 1900-1947. Also, correspondence, 1891-1946, between Butler and presidents of the United States including William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman.

Materials include correspondence and e-mail communications, mission reports, testimonies and interviews, addresses and contact lists, confidential interoffice memos, legal and advocacy material, internal planning and policy material, declassified government and United Nations documents, published and unpublished human rights reports from individuals and fellow non-governmental organizations (NGOs), press clippings and news releases, and maps. Another category of documents consists of HRW reports and briefing papers, as well as press releases and open letters to heads of state, governments and various government agencies.

Letters, manuscripts, and books, including four letters from MacNeice to the poet and editor, Geoffrey Grigson. The manuscripts, either by or about MacNeice, include ten of his last poems. Five of these have been published in SOLSTICE, 1961, and four in THE BURNING PERCH, 1963. Drafts of the first group of poems were written in a personal notebook used by the poet while he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In another similar notebook is a partial draft of his play "The Administrator." Both notebooks are in the collection. Also, an untitled, unpublished poem of seven stanzas"Tingling [born] the burning island" written on the reverse of a map. Works about NacNeice include manuscripts of a memoir and a radio portrait by Robert Pocock. The portrait has poignant comments and personal reminiscences by twenty of the poet's contemporaries, including John Betjeman, Anthony Blunt, W.H. Auden, E.R. Dodds, Stephen Spender, and others. Both Auden and a literary coterie of Spender, Betjeman, William Empson, and Cyril Connoly taped disucssions of MacNeice and his poetry. Also, thirty-eight books that were in MacNeice's personal library. Most are autographed by him, and many have marked passages and marginal notes. One of the books, Euripides' ALCESTIS AND OTHER PLAYS, is heavily annotated, apparently for a broadcast production.

Correspondence, manuscripts, dispatches, documents, clippings and other printed materials concerning his career as an editor and correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Moscow, Berlin and New York, as a staff member of the Institute of Pacific Relations from 1932 to 1934, as deputy director in the Office of War Information overseas branch, 1941-44, as an owner and editor of the New York Star, 1948-49, as an instructor in communications at Sarah Lawrence College, 1950-1951, as a book editor at Simon and Schuster, Publishers, 1951-1970, and as an author and translator.

A series of letters from Rotha to his wife, containing personal and professional observations during his early career in England and in New York. Also, one letter from Rotha to Peter Hunt.