Guide to the A.J. Liebling Collection,
1920-1963

American journalist, who served as reporter and columnist for the New Yorker magazine from 1935-1963.

Manuscripts, correspondence, galley proofs, printed articles, newspaper clippings, photographs, documents, and a few tapes and films, spanning Liebling's entire career as a journalist. The collection consists largely of typewritten drafts for hundreds of articles Liebling wrote for the New Yorker magazine, with his extensive autograph corrections, including his articles for the columns "Talk of the Town," "Our Far-Flung Correspondents," "A Reporter at Large," "Profiles," "The Wayward Press," "Fiction and Talk," "Letters From Paris" (1939-1944), "Normandy Revisited," and "Comment," as well as miscellaneous untitled articles. Also included are notes and drafts for his books The Press, Between Meals, The Honest Rainmaker, and The Pigs of St. Lô, as well as book reviews and stories he published in the New Yorker. The "Letters From Paris" articles give a firsthand account of life in Paris during World War II, mainly from 1939-1940, while "The Wayward Press" comments, often critically, on the practices of American journalism, especially in the Hearst and the McCormick newspapers.Also included are extensive notes and drafts for a book on Henry Luce and the Time empire which Liebling never published.

Correspondence includes letters from Liebling to his parents, Joseph and Anna Liebling, describing his life as a student at Dartmouth and at the Sorbonne in the early 1920's, and later letters to them which describe Paris before the Nazi occupation and London during the blitz. Other correspondents include Liebling's first wife, Ann (Beatrice McGinn) Liebling, and Jean Stafford, who became his third wife.

Large related collections of the papers of New Yorker writers E.B. White, Frank Sullivan, and Morris Bishop are also held in the repository.

Letters to Liebling are arranged in chronological order; manuscripts of articles by Liebling which have individual titles are arranged alphabetically by title; manuscripts of articles without individual titles (having only the title of an ongoing column) are arranged in chronological order; letters by Liebling, in chronological order; writings by others, alphabetically by author.