Call Number:

C0337

Repository:

Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division

Extent:

• 4 boxes
• 1.5 linear feet

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Selected Papers of Donald A. Stauffer, Box and Folder Number; Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Date:

1916-1952 (inclusive)

Creator:

Stauffer, Donald A.

Form:

Correspondence, Manuscripts., Photographs, Original., and Scrapbooks.

Abstract:

Consists of papers of the American literary critic and novelist Donald A. Stauffer (1902-1952, Princeton Class of 1923).

Donald A. Stauffer was an American literary critic and novelist. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1902, he graduated from Princeton University in 1923. He traveled to England as a Rhodes Scholar and continued his studies at Oxford University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1928. He returned to Princeton as an instructor in the English Department, later serving as the chairman of the English department. He authored English Biography before 1700, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England, The Nature of Poetry, The Golden Nightingale: Essays on Some Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats, and Shakespeare's World of Images: The Development of His Moral Ideas. Stauffer died in 1952.

The collection contains a typed, unpublished manuscript "Old Lovers' Ghosts," an autograph manuscript (4 pp.) entitled "My Anthology," and some personal papers of Stauffer (Princeton Class of 1923). "Old Lovers' Ghosts," is a study of ten English lovers, including Sir Kenelm Digby and Lady Venetia Stanley, John Evelyn and Margaret Blagge, Henry Cary and Elizabeth Tanfield, and Richard and Anne Fanshawes; and "My Anthology" contains amusing ink sketches and comments on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. A small selection of miscellaneous material includes a few photographs of Stauffer, copies of his birth certificate, letters of recommendation written on his behalf to the United States Marine Corps, and a transcript of his academic record at Princeton. Stauffer's correspondence with his family documents his years as a student at Princeton University, experiences in Europe as a Rhodes Scholar, teaching at Princeton, and service as a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. A scrapbook contains clippings related to Stauffer's books and correspondence to Stauffer from academics and writers, such as Jacques Barzun, Katherine Garrison Chapin, Harold Dodds, John Duffy, William Frost, Christian Gauss, Alfred Harbage, Emery Neff, Marjorie Nicolson, Charles Osgood, Henri Peyre, Mark Schorer, J. Duncan Spaeth, Edward Steese, Hugh Taylor, and Lionel Trilling. There is also a folder of correspondence by Carriella, possibly Stauffer's mother.

The collection has been arranged in the following order: manuscripts, miscellaneous materials, correspondence, scrapbook, and correspondence by Carriella.