Manuscript Group 9
PENNSYLVANIA WRITERS COLLECTION
1894-1992 and undated
4 cu. ft.
Notes, manuscripts, and related materials pertaining to certain
of the works of these Pennsylvania authors, composers, and poets:
Robert D. Arbuckle authored Pennsylvania Speculator and Patriot:
The Entrepreneurial John Nicholson, 1757-1800 published by The Pennsylvania
State University Press in 1975.
Frederick Moore Binder served as president of Whittier College from
1970-1975 during which period the Law School was added. He authored James
Buchanan and the American Empire that was published in 2003. He died at
Hershey, Pennsylvania on January 28, 2004 at the age of 83.
Andrew R. Bradley authored this undated Ms. concerning his experiences
growing up in western Pennsylvania coal towns.
Harry Thacker Burleigh was born in Erie, Pennsylvania on December
2, 1866 and studied under Antonin Dvorak at the National Conservatory of Music
where he subsequently served on the faculty. He was a founding member of the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). He died in
Stamford, Connecticut on September 12, 1949.
Will George Butler was born in Blossburg, Pennsylvania on January
31, 1876 and graduated from Mansfield State Normal School in 1897 where he
later formed Mansfield's first orchestra and also composed the alma mater.He
retired from teaching in 1938 and passed away at the former Blossburg State
Hospital on January 24, 1955.
Charles Wakefield Cadman was a musician reared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
who was active in the American folk movement and was especially interested
in Amerindian music and operas on American themes. In 1909 he collaborated
with poet Nelle Richmond Eberhart to produce "From the Land of the Sky
Blue Water" and he later wrote "Shanewis" in 1918, "Garden
of Mystery" in 1925, and " "The Witch of Salem" in 1926.
John M. Coleman, wrote a biography of Pennsylvania Governor Thomas
McKean entitled Thomas McKean: Conservative Revolutionary.
Margaret Deland (nee Margaretta Wade Campbell) was born in Allegheny,
Pennsylvania on February 23, 1857. She married Lorin F. Deland in 1880 after
which she began writing poetry that was first published in 1886. Her first
novel was published in 1888 and her "Old Chester" books were based
upon her memories of the Maple Grove and Manchester, Pittsburgh communities.
She earned a Litt. D. from Bates College in 1920 and died in Boston, Massachusetts
on January 13, 1945.
Hildegarde Dolson was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania and attended
Allegheny College in Meadville from 1926 to 1929. Moving to New York City
in 1929, she worked as a copywriter for Gimbels, Macy's, Franklin-Simon, and
Bamberger's before selling her first manuscript to The New Yorker.
After her first book was published in 1938 she became a full-time freelance
writer. She married the mystery writer Richard Lockridge in 1965 and died
in Columbus, North Carolina on January 15, 1981 at the age of 72.
John S. Duss was born in Cincinnatti, Ohio in 1860 and while his
father served in the Union Army his mother became a housekeeper to the Harmonist
Society at Economy, Pennsylvania in March, 1862. After his father died of
wounds sustained at the battle of Gettysburg, John studied music at the Harmonist
school and entered the soldier's orphan's school at Monaca, Pennsylvania where
he graduated in 1876. He subsequently took over the Economy band that he later
turned into a regional band. On May 25,1902 the Duss Concert Band first opened
for a New York engagement to rave reviews at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Following an ambitious North American tour, Duss performed another summer
season in 1905. After retiring to Economy in 1907 he passed away in 1951 at
the age of 91.
Elizabeth Fay authored this sheet music entitled "Anthracite"
in 1935
Clarence Augustus Faulcon earned a B.S. and M.S. in Music Education
from the University of Pennsylvania and a Mus.D. in Musicology from the Philadelphia
Conservatory of Music. He served as chairman of the Music Department of Morgan
State University and as assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra
in 1955-1956. He was also Chairman of Music at Cazenovia College.
Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania on
July 4, 1826 and distinguished himself as a largely self-taught musician many
of whose works were inspired by minstral songs. By 1853 he had an exclusive
contract with music publisher Firth, Pond, and Company but his financial situation
became increasingly unstable, a situation made worse when he separated from
his wife in 1854. During the 1860s he focused on producing sentimental ballads
rather than minstral songs and he died penniless on January 10, 1864.
Jonathan Goldstein, wrote this dissertation entitled "Philadelphia
and the China Trade, 1682-1846" for the University of Pennsylvania in
1974
Joseph Hergesheimer was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1880
and studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After editing
gally proofs for novelist Adeline King, who wrote under the name Lucas Cleeve,
Hergesheimer launched his own 30-year writing career during which he wrote
on a daily basis. Though he was unable to sell any books during his first
ten years, in 1913 he sold his first short story to the Saturday Evening
Post. His first novel, The Lay Anthony, was published the following
year and twenty novels followed from 1914 to 1934. He became a mentor to Sinclair
Lewis. Hergesheimer died in 1954 at the age of 74.
Grace Livingston Hill was born in Wellsville, New York on April 16,
1865. She wrote more than 100 novels about young female Christian women under
both her own name and as Marcia Macdonald. Though many of her earlier novels
were intended to proselytize, her publisher frequently removed overt religious
references and she later modified her style to appeal to a more secular audience.
Her last novel was published by her daughter in 1947.
Albert Lent authored "Bradford County Farmer" ca. 1973
Amelia Reynolds Long, was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania on November
25, 1904. When she was six years old her family moved to Harrisburg where
she would reside for the rest of her life. She graduated from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1931 and beginning in the 1920s she was already publishing
science fiction stories in the pulp magazines of that era. During the 1930s
and 1940s she began writing mystery novels, sometimes even providing the cover
art for them. During the 1950s she began writing poetry and also became a
textbook editor for Stackpole Books in Harrisburg. In her later years, she
served as a curator for the William Penn Memorial Museum in Harrisburg and
was very active with The Pennsylvania Poetry Society. She passed away at her
Harrisburg home on March 26, 1978.
Eunice Loncoske McCloskey was born in Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania on
May 24, 1904 and attended Columbia University. She married Lewis F. McCloskey
on January 9, 1932 and they had one child, Eunice Marie McCloskey Minteer.
She distinguished herself as an artist, illustrator, novelist, poet, and painter.
Following her death at Ridgway, Pennsylvania in August 1983 she became known
as the "Grandma Moses of Pennsylvania" by reason of her 4,000 paintings
and 17 published books.
Helen Reimensnyder Martin was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on
October 18, 1868 and aspired from a young age to be a writer. After teaching
school in Shamokin, and in New York City, she attended Swarthmore and Radcliffe
Colleges, taking courses in English and History before writing her first novels
that were privately published in 1900. After marrying the German music teacher
Frederic C. Martin in 1899, the couple resided in Harrisburg where she began
writing about the Pennsylvania Dutch. Her first successful novel was Tillie:
A Mennonite Maid that appeared in 1904. Martin published 35 novels and
numerous short stories between 1896 and 1939. She died in New Canaan, Connecticut
on June 29, 1939.
Katherine Mayo, was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania on January 27,
1867 and had a private education in Cambridge and Boston where she lived for
five years before accompanying her father to Dutch Guiana for eight years.
She became noted as a journalist, historian and researcher who was first published
in Life magazine in 1892 and contributed articles to the Saturday
Evening Post in 1894. Writing regularly for the Atlantic Monthly
and Scribner's Magazine under the pseudonym Katherine Prence, she became
a researcher and historian assisting Oswald Garrison Villard. Upon meeting
M. Moyca Newell in 1910, they became lifelong friends and traveled the world
together as Mayo conducted research for her social reform books. She died
at Bedford Hills, New York on October 9, 1940.
Lloyd Mifflin was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania on September 15,
1846. His father was the noted portrait artist John Houston Mifflin, and Lloyd
studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and under Thomas Moran
in Philadelphia. He sunsequently traveled through Europe where he studied
painting under Herman Herzog in Dusseldorf. Beginning in 1896, he began publishing
poetry, including more than 500 sonnets. His last collection of poems, As
Twilight Falls, was published in 1916. He passed away at his Columbia
country home Norwood on July 16, 1921.
Lois Miller authored the song "The Rolling Hills of Pennsylvania"
in 1939
Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania but his family
moved to Baltimore in 1900. He graduated from Haverford College in 1910 and
went to New College, Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, completing his studies
in 1913. He married Helen Booth Fairchild on June 14, 1914 and they resided
first in Hempstead, and then in Queens Village, before moving to Philadelphia,
and then to Roslyn Estates, New York where they remained for the rest of their
lives. Morley was distinguished as an American journalist, novelist, essayist,
and poet who also produced stage productions for a few years. He wrote his
own obituary for the Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Century Authors
in 1942.
Ernest Morrison authored City on a Hill about Harrisburg State
Hospital in 1992.
Ethelbert Woodbridge Nevin, was born in Edgeworth, Pennsylvania on
November 25, 1862 and studied music under William Guenther and von der Heide
at the Williams Conservatory. He then attended Western University where he
studied under S. Austin Pierce, B.J. Lang and Stephen Emery. He debuted as
a pianist and teacher at Pittsburgh in 1886 where he began writing serious
works for the orchestra and piano solo. He died in New Haven, Connecticut
on February 17, 1901.
George Balch Nevin was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania on March
15, 1859 and resided in Easton for most of his life. He wrote many cantatas
and hymns and was also a noted historian and popular lecturer. He died on
April 17, 1933.
Roy Franklin Nichols, (1896-1973) completed his doctorate at Columbia
University in 1923 and taught briefly before joining the faculty of the University
of Pennsylvania where he served as professor of history and dean of the graduate
school until his retirement in 1966. Among his many works, he was best known
for The Disruption of American Democracy, a study of the causes of
the Civil War, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. Nichols served as president
of the American Historical Association in 1966.
Edward F. Noble of Girard, Pennsylvania authored this poetry circa.
1960-1968
Pennsylvania Retired Public School Employees Association Collection,
1973-1976, contains research notes of nearly 225 members of the PRPSEA concerning
their teaching experiences and represents their contribution to the Bicentennial
of the American Revolution.
Irwin Richman was born in 1937 in Brooklyn, New York and earned a
B.A. in History from George Washington University in 1957 and also earned
an M.A. and Ph.D in 1965 from the University of Pennsylvania where he trained
as a medical historian. From 1965, her served as the first Curator of Science,
History, Industry and Technology at the new William Penn Memorial Museum in
Harrisburg until 1968. He was a founding member of the American Studies Program
at the Pennsylvania State University's newly established Capitol Campus from
1968 to 2003. In 1970 Richman married M. Susan Steigerwalt, a mathematician
and fellow faculty member at Penn State.
Conrad Michael Richter was born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania on October
13, 1890 and was first employed as an editor for the Patton, Pennsylvania
Courier at the age of 19. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1911 and then
to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1928. During the 1930s he published numerous
stories in various pulp magazines. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his
novel The Town, the third installment of his The Awakening Land
trilogy, in 1951. The Saturday Evening Post published a number of his
fantasy and science fiction stories during the 1950s and 1960s and he won
the National Book Award for Fiction in 1961. He passed away on October 30,
1968.
Mary Roberts Rinehart was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on August
12, 1876 and her first short stories appeared in Pittsburgh newspapers while
she was still in high school. After enrolling in nursing school she married
a young surgeon named Dr. Stanley Rinehart following her graduation in 1896.
During subsequent decades she wrote many short stories and novels. In 1915
she left for Europe to cover World War I for the Saturday Evening Post,
interviewing King Albert of Belgium, Winston Churchill, and Queen Mary of
England. During a tour of Indian reservanions in the American west she was
initiated into the Blackfoot tribe and made a second voyage to Europe to tour
the battlefieds in 1918. Outliving her husband by 25 years, she divided her
time between a Park Avenue apartment and a home at Bar Harbor, Maine where
she continued to write prolifically. She and her sons founded the publishing
firm Rinehart and Co. Rinehart passed away in New York City on September 22,
1958.
Homer Tope Rosenberger (1908-1982) graduated from Schuylkill College
in 1929 and subsequently earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.
He became the Supervisor of Training for the Bureau of Prisons for the United
States Department of Justice where he served for 30 years. He also served
as president of the Pennsylvania Historical Association and as a commissioner
for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Elsie Singmaster was born in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania on August
29, 1878 and attended high school in Allentown before the family moved to
Gettysburg. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1907 and
married Harold Lewars in April 1912. Widowed three years later, she continued
to write prolifically for American journals and magazines. She began writing
novels in 1915 and eventually produced 42 published books and 350 short stories.
Most of the novels and short stories were set in Macungie, Pennsylvania which
was called Millerstown in the stories.Her stories focused on the lives of
children and young adults in a Pennsylvania German community. She passed away
at Gettysburg on September 30, 1958.
Sylvester K. Stevens (1904-1974) was Pennsylvania State Historian,
and from 1956 to 1972, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission. The author of many volumes on the Commonwealth's history,
his classic Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation (1964) drew a famous
court suit from the daughter of Henry Clay Frick, who charged that Stevens
was too harsh on the industrialist though the court sustained Steven's judgment.
Mark Sullivan authored "Our Times" in 1932
George Swetnam was born at Hicks Station near Cincinnati, Ohio and
his family lived successively in North Carolina, Tennessee. Georgia, South
Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Swetnam attended the University of South
Carolina and the University of Alabama before graduating from the University
of Mississippi and earned a Bachelor of Divinity from Columbia Theological
Seminary where he studied archaeology, Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
He earned a Masters of Theology from Auburn Theological Seminary and a Ph.D
in Assyriology from the Hartford Seminary Association in 1930. A freelance
writer since high school, he joined the editorial staff of The Pittsburgh
Press in 1943 from which he retired in 1973. He also served as editor
of the Keystone Folklore Quarterly from 1959 to 1965 and founded the
Institute of Pennsylvania Rural Life and Culture. He sometimes wrote under
such pseudonyms as Francine Avery, Duke Barton, B. Duke, Frank Mantews, and
Acker Petit. .
Ida Tarbell was born in Erie, Pennsylvania on November 5, 1857 and
graduated from Allegheny College in 1880. From 1891 to 1894 she studied at
the Sorbonne and worked as a freelance writer. In 1894 she embarked on a career
as a pioneer investigative journalist for McClure's magazine, exposing
unfair labor practices at the Standard Oil Company that prompted the Supreme
Court decision to break up the Standard Oil monopoly in 1911. She died on
January 6, 1944 and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in
2000.
Henry Van Dyke was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 10,
1852. He earned a B.A. from Princeton University in 1873 and an M.A. in 1876.
After studying in Berlin for two years, he returned to America and was ordained
as a Presbyterian minister, serving the United Congregational Church in Newport,
Rhode Island. He married Ellen Reid of Baltimore in 1881 and from 1883 served
for eighteen years as pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church of New York
City. He published his first book, The Reality of Religion, in 1884
and he continued writing books on religious topics through 1905. Van Dyke
became Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University in 1900
and from 1908 was a visiting lecturer at the University of Paris. In 1913,
President Wioodrow Wilson appointed him ambassador to the Netherlands and
Luxembourg on the eve of the oubreak of the First World War. He later joined
the chaplain's corps of the U.S. Naval Reserve, serving as lieutenant commander
while he wrote the Navy Chaplain's Manual that was published in 1918.
Returning to Princeton in 1919, he retired in 1923 and passed away on April
10, 1933.
Cassandra Vivian at age 5 became the youngest Girl Scout to go to
a Pennsylvania wilderness camp and later spent 17 years living in the Middle
East. After returning to America, she has written extensively on both the
Middle East and on Pennsylvania communities including Monessen and Pittsburgh.
Paul A. W. Wallace (1894-1967) was born in Toronto and became a nationally
recognized anthropologist, historian, and folklorist during the 1940s and
1950s who specialized in Native American studies. An English professor and
department chair at Lebanon Valley College, Wallace conducted extensive research
into the ethnology of Indians and the Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania,
New York, and Canada. He was adopted into the Mohawk Nation on July 15, 1949
under the name Tor-ri-wa-wa-kon ("holding a message"). Wallace served
as editor of the journal Pennsylvania History and as a consultant to
the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission from 1951 to 1957 where
he was hired and served as a staff historian until 1965.
Neila Gardner White (1894-1957) wrote religious novels including
No Trumpet Before Him.
Margaret Widdemer was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania on September
30, 1884 and grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She graduated from the Drexel
Institute Library School in 1909 and published her first poem, The Factories,
that treated the subject of child labor. She married author and cellist Robert
Haven Schauffler in 1919 whose papers are held by the University of Texas
at Austin. Widdemer's memoir Golden Years I Had recounts her friendships
with such eminent writers as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot,
Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Owen Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on July 14, 1860.
After briefly attending schools in Switzerland and Great Britain, he studied
at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and graduated from Harvard
University in 1882 where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals
and editor of the Harvard Lampoon. After studying two years at the
Paris Conservatory, Wister graduated from Harvard Law School in 1888 and took
up the practice of law in Philadelphia. His career as a writer commenced in
1891 inspired by his 1885 trip through Wyoming. He met western artist Frederic
Remmington on an 1893 trip to Yellowstone sparking his lifelong interest in
writing western novels. Wister married his cousin Mary Channing in 1898 and
they had six children including the poet Mary Channing Wister. He died in
Saunderstown, Rhode Island on July 21, 1938 and is buried in the Laurel Hill
Cemetery in Philadelphia. An 11,490-foot mountain in Grand Teton National
Park is named for him.
Pennsylvania Writer's Manuscripts and Miscellaneous Materials, 1899-1970.
(15 boxes) {#9m.1}[Microfilm]
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