Scope and Content Note

Most of Colum's plays appear here in manuscript form, some in a number of drafts made over the years. I have gone through each of the forty-eight notebooks and tried to identify the contents page by page, since Colum's method of composing first drafts was to write a page or so of whatever he was thinking and then turn to something else on the next, continuing the first composition a page or an entire notebook later. The typed manuscript section contains a number of essays and poems familiar to Colum's readers as well as a number that have never appeared in print. The printed material includes page proofs from Mary Colum's Life and the Dream as well as reviews and articles about Colum. One of the more interesting items to Joyce enthusiasts is item 242, copy 22 of Joyce's Haveth Childers Everywhere, initiated by Joyce and signed by Colum.

The 174 letters in the collection represent correspondence to the Colums from many of the great names in Irish and American literature as well as Irish history. All the letters found in Colum's apartments appear in the collection. These are arranged alphabetically according to the authors' last names. The pictures as well as letters bearing undecipherable signatures were identified by Colum himself.

I am deeply indebted to Mr. Josiah T. Newcomb, Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Binghamton, for his confidence and judgment in consenting to the purchase of the Colum Collection. I would like also to extend my appreciation to Juan Freudenthal and O. P. Malhotra for their interest and assistance in preparing this catalogue.

 

By Zack Bowen

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