The John Gould Fletcher Papers
About the Collection
John Gould Fletcher's extensive library, manuscripts, and correspondence were acquired for the University Libraries over a period of at least twenty years. The voluminous correspondence includes letters Fletcher wrote and received from 1889, when he was thirteen years old, through May 1950, shortly before his death. The catalog of Fletcher's correspondents includes more than 1,100 names and demonstrates the diversity and range of his personal and professional contacts. These included both established and still-struggling literary figures—poets and other writers, publishers, and editors—business connections, relatives and friends, people who either shared or disputed his opinions on countless subjects, even fans and ancestor hunters.
The Fletcher Papers also include manuscripts of Fletcher's literary output: poems, essays, short stories, plays, and lectures. Drafts of many poems afford the researcher an opportunity to follow the development of the poet's thought and techniques. Manuscripts include both Fletcher's published and unpublished works. A small proportion of the Fletcher Papers is contained on five rolls of microfilm. These documents reflect the attempt to include as much of Fletcher's correspondence as could be located either in private hands or in other repositories. A catalog, indexes, and other finding aids provide access to the entire collection.
John Gould Fletcher's library of more than 1,700 volumes is the working collection of a professional man of letters in the first half of the twentieth century. Major and minor British, Continental, and American writers are represented in these volumes, usually first editions. Many contain the authors' inscriptions, as well as Fletcher's annotations and marginalia. The library also includes long runs and scattered issues of many "little magazines" to which Fletcher contributed, and a collection of pamphlets on subjects that interested him.
About John Gould Fletcher
John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) was born into a socially prominent Little Rock family. They lived in a mansion formerly occupied by Albert Pike, with large oaks, tall columns, and other features Fletcher later described in a poem sequence, "Ghosts of an Old House." In 1907, shortly after his father's death, Fletcher dropped out of Harvard. The next year he went to Europe to study Continental culture at close range. Having made what in his autobiography Fletcher calls "the supremely fatal mistake of supposing at twenty-one that I must be a poet," in 1913 he published five books of poetry. For twenty-four years he lived in Europe, chiefly in London, and participated in the cultural ferment of the time. He was acquainted with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., Richard Aldington, I. A. Richards, and other English writers and artists. On periodic visits to the United States he enjoyed the friendship of Amy Lowell and Conrad Aiken, and associated with the "Fugitives" in the American South, contributing an essay to their manifesto I'll Take My Stand. He contributed to the initial publication of Some Imagist Poets and to The Criterion, Poetry, and other important "little magazines" in both England and the United States.
In 1933, Fletcher returned to the United States to live, and two years later married the writer Charlie May Simon. They built "Johnswood," a residence on the bluffs of the Arkansas River outside Little Rock. They traveled often, however, to New York for the intellectual stimulation and to American Southwest for the climate after Fletcher began to suffer from arthritis. Fletcher turned in the 1930s to regional and local themes. He organized the Arkansas Folklore Society, collected Ozark folk songs, and was briefly a visiting lecturer at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. His autobiography, Life Is My Song, was published in 1937. In 1938 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems, drawn from his lifelong output. He published two volumes of poems in the 1940s, as well as Arkansas, a history of his native state. He died in Little Rock in 1950 and is buried in the Mount Holly cemetery.
In his lifetime, Fletcher published twenty-six books and more than 450 articles, reviews, and poems in magazines and journals in England and the United States. His papers provide resources for studies in cultural history, biography, and literary politics as well as in the development of modernism in British and American literature.
Related Materials
Other manuscript collections held in the department bear on the life and work of John Gould Fletcher. The Latanè Temple Papers contain correspondence between Mr. Temple and Fletcher in 1948-1949. The Eugene Haun Papers, 1923-1950, include correspondence between Fletcher and Henry Bergen, among others.
Access
A descriptive finding aid to the collection is available.
Finding aids include dissertations by three graduate students of the Department of English:
- The Correspondence of John Gould Fletcher: A Catalogue, by T.E. Douglass, 1965 (available on microfilm through interlibrary loan)
- A Name, Works and Selected Subjects Index of the Correspondence of John Gould Fletcher. A-K by Oliver L. Peters, 1965; L-Z by James M. Moffett, 1968 (a card index maintained in the department)
Access to the John Gould Fletcher Papers is open to students, faculty, and others upon application to the staff.Researchers may direct inquiries to Special Collections, but extensive projects will require a visit to the department. To facilitate their work, researchers who wish to use the papers are advised to email, write, or telephone the department in advance.