Dudley Randall was working as a librarian in Detroit in 1963 when he learned of the brutal bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Randall’s poetic response was “The Ballad of Birmingham,” a work that became widely known after it was set to music by the folk singer Jerry Moore. To register his copyright, Randall printed a broadside edition of the ballad, which in September 1965 became the first publication of the Broadside Press. Over the next decade, Randall grew to become a significant poet in his own right, but as his Broadside Press grew, it too gained prominence, becoming an important venue for writers of the Black Arts Movement and the new poetic voices of Black America.

Born in Washington D.C. on January 14, 1914, the son of a Congressional Minister (Arthur George Clyde) and a teacher (Ada Viola), Randall moved with his family to Detroit in 1920. Developing an interest in poetry at a young age, Randall passed through a series of jobs and war-time military service before using the GI bill to attend college. At Wayne State University, from which he graduated in 1948, and while in library school at the University of Michigan (1951), he continued to nurture his literary talents, but it was several years more before they began to reach full flower, fertilized both by the civil rights movement and the emerging Black Arts Movement.

Although Randall wrote that the Broadside Press “did not grow from a blueprint,” it grew “by hunches, intuitions, trial and error” into something more ambitious than a vehicle for Randall’s own writing. While attending the first Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in May 1966, Randall obtained permission from Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Margaret Walker to republish one poem each in what he called his Broadside Series, which became broadsides 3, 4, and 5 during the fall 1966. Shortly thereafter, Gwendolyn Brooks gave permission for Randall to republish one of her poems, resulting in “We Real Cool” in December 1966 (Broadside 6). Collectively, these first six broadsides, known as the Poems of the Negro Revolt, set a tone for what would follow, reflecting the culturally assertive and often radical voice of African America in the late 1960s. Intentionally simple in design, the broadsides can be viewed through the lens of a centuries-old tradition of publication. Produced and sold cheaply, typically responding directly to the social and political issues of the moment, the broadsides address subjects ranging from Malcolm X, to Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, Black Power, the women’s movement, and revolutionary politics. Later productions in the Broadsides series are not properly broadsides at all, but simple folded sheets, resulting in four page cards, often including poems by several writers.

Following the suggestion of a reviewer in the Small Press Review, Randall took an important step forward in 1968 by issuing broadsides of previously unpublished work, beginning with Haki Madhubuti’s (then Don L. Lee) “Assassination,” a response to the murder of Martin Luther King. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, the Press issued over one hundred broadsides, generally one per month, featuring the works of some of the preeminent African American poets of that time. In addition to Brooks and Madhubuti, the Press published works by Alice Walker, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez.

Randall simultaneously developed the Press beyond broadsides. By 1966, he was publishing collections of poetry, beginning with his own Poem Counterpoem (written with Margaret Danner, 1966), followed by Cities Burning (on the Detroit riots; 1968), and the anthology For Malcolm: poems on the life and the death of Malcolm X (1969). Politically charged and reflecting the mood of the period, these publications enjoyed consistently strong sales. Randall also used the Press to publish works of literary criticism by Black scholars (many through his Broadside Critics Series) and works by writers from elsewhere in the African diaspora. His success as a supporter and publisher of African American earned him praise as the “father of the black poetry movement” and in 1985, Mayor Coleman Young named him the first poet laureate for the city of Detroit.

Randall sold the press to Hilda and Donald Vest in 1985, who continue to operate it. When Randall died in 2000, he was remembered in an obituary in the Detroit News as the city’s “other Berry Gordy, the one who never left the west side of Detroit, never made millions and never became a glitter-sprinkled celebrity. Yet he, too, beamed black voices around the world.”

The Broadside Press Collection includes approximately 200 titles published by Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based press during its first decade of operation, a period when it exerted significant cultural influence. The printed works are divided into five series, Broadside poets (including chapbooks, books of poetry, and posters), anthologies, children’s books, the Broadside Critics Series (works of literary criticism by African American authors), and the Broadsides Series. The collection also includes a selection of items used in promoting Broadside Press publications, including a broken run of the irregularly published Broadside News, press releases, catalogs, and fliers and advertising cards.

The collection is relatively complete for the Press during its early years. It includes a complete run of the first 92 broadsides issued by Randall, all of the books published before 1975 except for Spirits unchained by Keorapetse Kgositsile (1969) and Black man listen by Marvin X (1969), and all but two of the posters, Dudley Randall’s On getting a natural (1970) and Protect the sister by Reginald Payne and Pearl Eckles (1971).

The general Du Bois Library collections include other, later imprints by Randall and the Broadside Press, including:

• Randall, Dudley, 1914- . More to Remember: poems of four decades. Chicago, Ill. : Third World Press, 1971. Du Bois Call no.: PS3568.A49 M6

A bibliography of the Broadside Press appeared in Evelyn Leasher, “The Broadside Press of Detroit,” Michigan Historical Review 26.1 (2000).

A voice of the radical working class during the Great Depression, Jack Conroy was the son of a union organizer, born and raised in the mining camps near Moberly, Mo. Conroy was weaned on Socialist thought through his father and the nickel pamphlets of the Haldeman-Julius Company, and was encouraged to pursue an interest in literature. As a boy, he wrote and edited his own four-page newspaper, printing it by hand on scraps of butcher paper and distributing it among family and neighbors, and by the time he was admitted to the University of Missouri in 1920, he was already showing a distinctively populist edge.

The University, however, was not in his future. After only one term, Conroy dropped out of school rather than take part in the compulsory military training, and went on the road, traveling the country by boxcar, taking odd jobs as a migrant worker, in auto factories, and steel mills. Barely managing to stay afloat financially, he married Elizabeth Gladys Kelly in June 1922, with whom he had three children.

Neither poverty nor the rigors of work held Conroy back from his goal of becoming a writer. In the late 1920s, he began to publish poetry and essays reflecting a working class perspective on the inequities of life in America, writing in a style he later described as “vivifying the present.” Intensely political by nature, he associated broadly with a number of rebels, Communists, and working class radicals, though Conroy himself was never doctrinaire, often earning criticism from the more dogmatic for being insufficiently radical, and criticism from the right for being too radical.

In 1931, Conroy took over as editor of the Rebel Poet, a “little magazine” associated with the International Workers of the World, and soon enjoyed his first literary success. A short story he published in New Masses attracted the attention of H. L. Mencken, who asked Conroy for a contribution for the American Mercury. The result, “Hard winter,” was lauded by Mencken and held up as a gripping account of what life in the Depression was really like. Mencken became one of Conroy’s biggest supporters, accepting several more of Conroy’s stories (yielding much-needed income), and helping him to land the contract for his first novel. Based loosely on his experiences riding the rails and working in automobile factories, The Disinherited (1933) sold poorly, but was a critical sensation. It has been described as the first “proletarian” novel written in the United States by a true proletarian, and since the 1960s, it has become a minor part of the cannon of Depression-era literature. His second and more polished novel, A World to Win, appeared two years later to similar acclaim, but even poorer sales.

Conroy launched a second little magazine in 1933, the Anvil, transforming it in just over three years into the most successful of the radical literary magazines of the decade. The Anvil published works by young writers such as Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Louis Zara, and Erskine Caldwell, and although much of the writing was “roughhewn and awkward,” in Conroy’s words, it was fueled by working class rage, “bitter and alive from the furnace of experience.” The success of the Anvil, however, led to it being swallowed up in a power play by the Partisan Review in 1937, freezing a bitter Conroy on the outside. At Algren’s suggestion, he moved to Chicago in March 1938 to join the Illinois Writers Project and launched a third little magazine, the New Anvil, attempting to pick up where the lamented Anvil left off. The magazine debuted in March 1939 with a lead work by William Carlos Williams, but lasted only seven numbers before it succumbed during the war.

After the failure of the New Anvil, Conroy took a position as associate editor with the New Standard Encyclopedia. His later books include five works of juvenile fiction co-authored with his friend Arna Bontemps, and numerous works on folklore and folk humor. Conroy retired to Moberly in 1966, continuing to write well into his 80s and mentoring younger radicals. He died in Moberly on February 28, 1990.

The Conroy Collection includes a series of 24 letters from Jack Conroy to Lewis Fried, a professor of English at Kent State University and UMass PhD, along with a small number of letters by associates of Conroy, and a selection of publications associated with or including work by him. Of particular interest are Fried’s oral history interviews with Conroy (1971) and Sally Goodman (1981).

In his letters and in the oral history, Conroy discusses his career in writing, his novel The Dispossessed and other literary activities in the 1930s, with occasional comments on current events. The letters of Irving Friedman, Percival Goodman, and Walter Snow all relate to Conroy and proletarian fiction, while James T. Farrell, who often clashed with Conroy, simply denies Fried access to his papers. The collection also includes a typed copy of Michael Gold’s review of the The Dispossessed that appeared in the New Masses.

The small assortment of printed items include copies of the populist magazines Foolkiller (two issues) and North Country Anvil, and an issue of the American Book Collector that includes an article on Conroy and bibliography of his writing. There are, as well, photocopies of several of Conroy’s stories from the American Mercury.

The major collection of Conroy Papers is held at the Newberry Library, Chicago, with additional material at Southern Illinois University; the Department of Special Collections at Kent State University (newsclippings); and the Moberly Area Community College, Moberly, Mo.

Karl Kraus

Karl Kraus was born on April 28, 1874 in Gitschin, Bohemia (modern Jicin, Czech Republic), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The son of Jakob Kraus, a wealthy Jewish papermaker and businessman, and his wife Ernestine Kantor, Karl moved with his family to Vienna in 1877. He began to study law at the University of Vienna in 1892, but after changing his major to philosophy and German studies, he decided to leave the university in 1896 without a degree in hand.

Still in his early twenties, Kraus launched himself into a career in literature, publishing the first issue of a new journal, Die Fackel (“The Torch”), in April 1899. Kraus attracted a number of well-known artists and writers to Die Fackel in its first decade, however, by 1911 Kraus had become virtually the sole contributor. Despite the dearth of other writers, Kraus continued to edit and publish Die Fackel until his death in 1936.

Kraus is typically considered a key member of the fin de siècle literary and artistic culture in Vienna. This group included artists such as Gustav Klimt, a pioneer of the Art Nouveau movement, and a later the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, who painted a portrait of Kraus. Typically, the writers and painters associated with Kraus were immersed in the twin ideas of both cultural decadence and imminent change. Die Fackel, in fact, was intended to hold a “torch” to the hypocrisy of German and Austrian society and the Austro-Hungarian government. In his writing, Kraus criticized everything from psychoanalysis to the corruption of the Habsburg Empire, laissez-faire economic policies, and the nationalism of the pan-German (Grossdeutschland) movement, among many other topics.

However, Kraus was not limited to biting essays on subjects of cultural concern, nor was he necessarily limited to these particular subjects in all of his writing. Kraus is known for using an array of literary vehicles to express himself, including essays, plays, poems, and aphorisms. His best-known work is the satirical play, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (“The Last Days of Mankind”), a massive piece about World War I. Kraus also exhibited a lasting interest in language, about which he wrote regularly in Die Fackel as well as in books such as Die Sprache (Language). His linguistic interests also led him to re-translate Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1932.

The fact that newspaper articles discussing Kraus and his work could still be found in German-language newspapers nearly 30 years after his death speaks to his strong influence in German literature and cultural studies. His last writing, an issue of Die Fackel, appeared in February 1936. He died in Vienna four months later on June 12, 1936, from a stroke and heart failure.

The Kraus Collection consists primarily of materials written about Karl Kraus, with few items by him. In total only three items can be attributed definitively to Kraus, and one unsigned letter from 1910 may be by Kraus.

Instead, the value of the collection is as a gauge for Kraus’ cultural impact in Europe during his life and well after. Gabriel Rosenrauch, an avid Kraus fan and the individual responsible for compiling this collection, took care to preserve newspaper articles concerning Kraus from 1914-1962. This includes a large collection of articles and obituaries from 1936, which were clipped from newspapers printed in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, a copy of a British newspaper that includes a review of a book written about Kraus, and articles written in Hebrew and Yiddish.

Not only did Rosenrauch save newspaper clippings, he saved flyers advertising plays and lectures by Kraus and pamphlets that include articles written about Kraus, many by Werner Kraft, a well-known German scholar of Kraus, author, and librarian. In addition, Rosenrauch collected two French-language items from La Société des Etudes Germanique (the Society of Germanic Studies). Rosenrauch also came into possession of a large collection of photographs of Kraus, depicting his life from adolescence to old age, up to and including his apartment in Vienna and gravesite. Among the photographs is a view of an unidentified synagogue, which may be where Kraus’ funeral service was held.

Also of importance are a set of extensive indexes compiled by Rosenrauch of articles in Die Fackel. While the script is difficult to read, it is clear that Rosenrauch took considerable care to document and catalog the subjects of the articles written by Kraus and other contributors to the journal. The care epitomized in these indexes extends throughout the collection. Several articles and essays are present as typed copies, presumably prepared by Rosenrauch, in particular the work by Hermann Hesse and several of the pieces by Werner Kraft.

Finally, since this collection was created by Rosenrauch, it includes his some of his personal correspondence. These letters are mostly exchanged with Helene Kann, a Kraus archivist, whom he helped to escape from Vienna and then from Europe after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. These letters do not necessarily provide insight into Kraus, but they do provide interesting details about the collector as he maneuvered around Europe during World War II, ultimately ending up in Israel until his death in the 1960s.

The following is a list of works by Karl Kraus collected by Gabriel Rosenrauch housed with the Rare Books in the Special Collections and University Archives.

• Die Fackel. Wien : Verlag “Die Fackel”, 1899-1936. (AP30 .F15)
• Kraus, Karl. Epigramme. Wien ; Leipzig : Verlag “Die Fackel”, 1927. (PT2621.R27 E8 1927)
• Kraus, Karl. Literatur, oder Man wird doch da Sehn. Magische Operette in zwei Teilen. Wien : Verlag “Die Fackel”, 1921. (PT2621.R27 L48 1921)
• Kraus, Karl. Literatur und Lüge. Wien : Die Fackel, 1929. (PT2621.R27 L5 1929)
• Kraus, Karl. Die chinesische Mauer. Wien : Die Fackel, 1930. (PT2621.R27 C5 1930)
• Kraus, Karl. Nachts. Wien : Die Fackel, 1924. (PT2621.R27 N3 1924)
• Kraus, Karl. Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität. Wien : Die Fackel, 1923. (PT2621.R27 S5 1923)
• Kraus, Karl. Die Sprache. Wien, Verlag “Die Fackel”, 1937. (PT2621.R27 S83 1937)
• Kraus, Karl. Spräche und Widerspräche. Wien : Die Fackel, 1924. (PT2621.R27 S88 1924)
• Kraus, Karl. Die letzten Tage der Menschheit : Tragodie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog. Wien : Die Fackel, 1922. (PT2621.R27 L42 1922)
• Kraus, Karl. Traumstück. Wien ; Leipzig : Verlag “Die Fackel”, [1923] (PT2621.R27 T85 1922)
• Kraus, Karl. Traumtheater: Spiel in einem Akt. Wien : Die Fackel, 1924. (PT2621.R27 T86 1924)
• Kraus, Karl. Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie. Wien : Die Fackel, 1925. (PT2621.R27 U5 1925)
• Kraus, Karl. Die Unüberwindlichen, Nachkriegsdrama in vier Akten. Wien, Leipzig, Verlag “Die Fackel,” 1928. (PT2621.R27 U54 1928)
• Kraus, Karl. Wolkenkuckucksheim : phantastisches Versspiel in drei Akten auf Grundlage der “Vogel” von Aristophanes (mit Beibehaltung einiger Stellen der Chöre in der Schinckäschen Ubersetzung). Wien ; Leipzig : Verlag “Die Fackel”, 1923. (PT2621.R27 W58 1923)
• Kraus, Karl. Worte in Versen. München, Käsel-Verlag, [1959] (PT2621.R27 W6)
• Kraus, Karl. Zeitstrophen. Wien : Die Fackel, 1931. (PT2621.R27 Z2 1931)

William Raymond Manchester was born on April 1, 1922 in Attleboro, Massachusetts. His parents, William Manchester, Sr. and Sallie Elizabeth Rombough Thompson, came from strikingly different backgrounds, both impressing upon young William their family identities. Manchester’s father enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in France during World War I. While fighting in the Argonne Forest he was severely wounded and left for dead. He never fully recovered, dying from complications from these wounds nearly thirty years later. Upon his return home from the war, William, Sr. sought a new profession, his disabled arm having robbed him of his livelihood as a costume jewelry designer. He became a social worker and later a leading advocate in Massachusetts for birth control. In contrast, Manchester’s mother was a member of the southern aristocracy. Born in Virginia, Sallie was a descendent of Stonewall Jackson. Their unlikely union was fostered during William, Sr.’s extended stay in the Norfolk hospital where Sallie volunteered. The two married soon after the war and settled in Attleboro.

In 1934, William, Sr. moved his family from Attleboro to Springfield in order to continue his work as a child advocate. Manchester was, by his own account, a sickly child. He spent the better part of his youth harassed by neighborhood bullies. His poor health and general lack of physical strength forced him indoors where he poured over works of literature. Later he sought to overcome his childhood weakness by taking up swimming, a sport in which he excelled. Manchester was a student in the Springfield public school system and entered Massachusetts State College in the fall of 1940. His college career was halted, as many others were, by the outbreak of World War II. Nearly 2,000 men and women from Massachusetts State College enlisted in the armed forces during this time, Manchester among those who volunteered. Honoring his father’s legacy, he enlisted with the Marines on July 4, 1942.

Manchester spent his first enlisted year in Amherst, Massachusetts on Inactive Ready Reserve and then moved on to Dartmouth College to participate in the Navy’s V-12 program. The V-12 program enabled young men to continue their college education while also providing the Navy and Marine Corps with a ready pool of officers. Some 120,000 men were accepted into the V-12 program and of that number approximately half received a commission. Manchester did not enjoy what he viewed as a mundane existence at Dartmouth and eagerly awaited his orders. During this time, he relied heavily upon letters from family and friends to keep him informed and energized. In particular, his correspondence with his mother and brother, Robert, was a source of joy to him.

His days of drills and classrooms, however, were finally ended in August 1943 when he received orders to report to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Carolina. Notorious for its harsh treatment of young men, the challenges of Parris Island were embraced by the 21-year-old. Even though the physical tests were taxing, Manchester reveled in pushing himself to the limit. Early on the men were told that only a select few would be going on to Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Quantico, the rest would be sent as privates to the base at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Manchester knew that making the cut would be difficult, but his only real moment of concern came when his platoon visited the shooting range. Marksmanship did not come naturally to him, and he worried a poor performance would limit his chances for Quantico. On the day of qualification he registered a score that qualified him as an expert; a score that not only allowed him bragging rights, but also added an extra $10 bonus to his monthly pay.

In spite of his success on the shooting range, Manchester was surprised to receive his orders to report to OCS in November 1943, and even more surprised to learn he was ranked third in his class. Immediately upon arrival, Manchester disliked Quantico. The physical and mental tasks while exhausting were bearable, it was the way in which candidates were dropped that he despised. Officer candidates were subject to peer evaluation, which Manchester feared fostered a vindictive environment. He firmly believed that he was officer material and that the Corps would be making a mistake if they dropped him. Unfortunately, Manchester experienced a set back in his training in February 1944 when he contracted a severe case of scarlet fever. After his recovery, he was forced to fall back a class and watch while members of his OCS class received their commissions ahead of him. Manchester never received his commission and was sent instead to New River.

Assigned to the 29th Marine attachment in Camp Lejeune on May 4, 1944, Manchester was billeted to the eight week Advanced Combat Intelligence Course. He studied enemy weapons and tactics during the course, and spent endless hours on maneuvers in the boondocks. Manchester struck up a brief relationship with a young woman who was a private in the Marines assigned to nearby Cherry Point. He spent his free time with her as well as frequenting the movie theater on base, reading, and swimming on the shore to escape the brutal summer heat. He completed the Intelligence course the second week of July and moved to Tent City, a make-shift camp in another section of Camp Lejeune. Manchester’s time in Tent City was short-lived. The Marines received their orders and boarded a troop train on July 8, 1944. The train, scarcely better than a cattle car in Manchester’s view, slowly made its way through the scorching summer heat across the southern U.S. to San Diego. While in San Diego, Manchester’s mother, who herself had moved to Oklahoma City the previous year, traveled to see her oldest son before his deployment. She arrived on July 26th for a brief visit. Six days later, Manchester boarded a gleaming new transport ship, the APA Morton, on its maiden voyage to the South Pacific.

Manchester disembarked the Morton nine days later on the island of Guadalcanal. The battle for the island had long since ended, but its beaches and forests were still strewn with remnants of the conflict. Later he transferred to the small Ulithi Atoll in the Western Carolinas. Manchester spent most of his days trying to escape the sweltering equatorial sun and avoiding the dreaded malaria and various types of tropical skin ailments that plagued U.S. soldiers. It was here that the U.S. prepared for assaults on Okinawa and Japan. Ulithi became home to 6,000 servicemen and was a virtual floating warehouse in the South Pacific.

On April 1, 1945 (Manchester’s 23rd birthday), the assault was launched to take Japanese airfields on Okinawa. After the previous battles of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines in which the Japanese had refused to give up any ground without a rigorous fight, the attack on Okinawa was anticipated to be a bloody and drawn-out battle. The U.S objective to capture Okinawa would cost the lives of 12,000 American soldiers and 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan soldiers. It was by far the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific theater. Manchester and his comrades landed on the beach at 8:27 A.M., but much to their surprise they took the beach and airfields without contest. The Japanese positioned the defense of the island elsewhere and left the initial landing points open. Manchester began making maps and detailing enemy troop movements and fortifications. He was sent out on patrols and watched as men he had trained with died from horrific wounds. The survivors, wracked with stress and grief, were transformed into muddy, bloody messes who often possessed the “thousand-mile stare,” a term frequently used to describe combat veterans. Manchester’s attachment alone lost 2,812 of the original 3,512 men who landed on the beach. Manchester himself was shot through the kneecap, but left the medical tent when he heard his attachment was on the move. The battlefields became quagmires of mud that would suck down anything less powerful than the Amtrak, and Manchester would later scoff at complaints of mud and rain from men who served in the European theater.

In the opening days of June, the 29th Marines participated in an assault on the Oroku peninsula, located on Okinawa’s southern end. On June 4, 1944 during the early hours of the morning, Manchester and his men took shelter in the courtyard of a mausoleum. As they were gearing up for the day ahead, they heard the impending shriek of an incoming round. It was decided that the hillside they were on, in addition to the surrounding courtyard walls, would provide them adequate shelter. They were gravely mistaken. The round landed in the middle of the courtyard instantly killing one man and seriously wounding the rest. Manchester’s body was riddled with shrapnel, and he suffered two ruptured eardrums and a severe concussion. Loaded on board a transport ship and sent to Saipan for recovery, Manchester witnessed the war’s end from a Navy hospital bed. He later wrote about his experience serving in the South Pacific in Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War.

After the war, Manchester returned to school and received his B.A. from Massachusetts State College in 1946. He next entered graduate school at the University of Missouri where he earned his master’s degree the following year. Throughout the 1950s, Manchester worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. With the publication of his first biography, Disturber of the Peace: Life of H.L. Mencken, he turned his attention to fiction, completing four novels in less than ten years. Based upon the strength of his biography Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile, Manchester was hand-picked by the Kennedy family to write the authorized account of JFK’s assassination. Despite being selected by the family to write the volume, Manchester’s account created controversy even before it was published. The Kennedy family worried that any comments critical of President Johnson and his administration would hurt Robert Kennedy’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Jacqueline Kennedy also did not approve of Manchester’s contract to have the book serialized in Look magazine. Eventually the manuscript was approved and the account was published in 1968. The book was well-received, even if some reviewers have since described the work as too subjective. With its publication, however, Manchester’s reputation as a detailed historical researcher and writer was secured. He followed it up with a biography of Douglas MacArthur and an ambitious multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, which he was unable to complete before his death.

Manchester married Julia Brown Marshall in 1948 and together they had three children: John Kennerly, Julie Thompson, and Laurie. In 1979, he was hired as an adjunct professor at Wesleyan University, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. Manchester received numerous honors throughout his lifetime, including the National Humanities Medal in 2002. Toward the end of his life Manchester suffered from two strokes. His poor health interfered with the completion of the third volume of his Churchill biography, which he was writing with the assistance of journalist Paul Reid. William Manchester died on June 1, 2004 at the age of eighty-two at his home in Middletown, Connecticut.

The collection consists primarily of letters from William Manchester to his mother written during his service with the 29th Marines in World War II. The bulk of the letters cover the time period from July 1943 to July 1945, and document his training and subsequent service in the South Pacific. Manchester’s correspondence with his mother is both detailed and frequent. His letters include descriptions of his daily activities and schedule; his health; the rigorous training he endures; his friends, comrades, and superiors; the stringent rules and protocol of the Marine Corps; and perhaps most importantly his impressions of the war and his role in fighting it.

The letters are of particular significance, however, because they record Manchester’s activities and views during the hours and days he experienced them; as such they offer an interesting point of contrast to the memoir he wrote many years after the war that recounts the same period. In his book, Goodbye, Darkness, Manchester describes his war-time experiences as he recalls them forty years later, once he has had time to reflect on their meaning and importance both personally and historically. The letters, then, offer a rare opportunity to compare one soldier’s story told as it is unfolding (in his more or less private writings) with the same story re-told after years of reflection in a polished (and published, so intentionally public) narrative.

There are inevitable differences in the two accounts. An example of one such discrepancy occurs in Manchester’s account of his final week of OCS training. In a letter home, Manchester tells his mother that he has been warned he will not receive his commission because his physical stature does not reflect the ideal physique of a typical Marine. He is given the same explanation–this time officially–in the commands office on the very day he is to receive his commission. Instead of receiving his bars, he is told he will be sent to the camp at New River. Clearly distraught in his letter, Manchester reassures his mother that he will recover from the disappointment.

The account published in Goodbye, Darkness is rather different. This version of Manchester’s last week focuses on a rifle inspection called without notice on a day when a weekend pass was to be awarded. While Manchester’s weapon passes muster with the inspecting Lieutenant, some of his comrades’ weapons do not. As a result, they are all confined to barracks for the weekend and ordered to spend the time cleaning their rifles. Manchester balks at the order and refuses to comply. The corporal who issued it is incensed by Manchester’s insubordination and brings him before a court martial tribunal. Manchester makes a request to join his father’s old unit, the 5th Marines, but is refused and sent to camp at New River as a corporal. While this re-telling does not dramatically alter the narrative, it does cast a new light on the events of Manchester’s last week of training, and more significantly on the way he choose to describe those events years later.

The collection also contains printed materials such as an issue of The Leatherneck and issues of the Massachusetts State College Quarterly, newspaper clippings, Manchester’s copies of restricted training manuals issued to soldiers and officers during World War II, a menu for the Victory Dinner on March 31, 1945, and photocopies of annotated typescripts of American Caesar: The Life of Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 and Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War.

The following is a list of William Manchester’s books donated by the author at the same time he donated his personal papers to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Although only the first editions and translations are listed below, the Special Collections also holds many later editions of these works.

• Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken. New York Harper, 1951.
• The City of Anger: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. Also German translation.
• Shadow of the Monsoon. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956. Also Dutch translation.
• Beard the Lion. New York: M.S. Mill Company and William Morrow & Company, 1958.
• A Rockerfeller Family Portrait: From John D. to Nelson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. Also French translation.
• The Long Gainer: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
• Portrait of a President. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Also Danish translation.
• The Death of a President: November 20 – November 25, 1963. New York Harper and Row, 1967. Also Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish translations.
• The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. Also French, German, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish translations.
• The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-1972. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Also Dutch, French, Japanese, and Spanish translations.
• Controversy and Other Essays in Journalism 1950-1975. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
• American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.
• Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.

The bulk of William Manchester’s professional papers are held by the
Wesleyan University Special Collections & Archives.