Croswell Bowen papers

The Croswell Bowen Papers span the dates 1880-1966, and document some of the professional activities of Croswell Bowen. The collection consists of three series. Series I, Correspondence , is housed in Box 1 and contains alphabetically arranged correspondence. Letters from unidentified writers have been placed at the end of the series. The correspondence is entirely business-related, with the exception of a small group of letters Bowen received in 1928 concerning an undergraduate research project in which he asked literary figures to compare Harvard men and Yale men. Respondents include James Rowland Angell, Henry Emerson Fosdick, H. L. Mencken, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and William Lyon Phelps, who suggested that the Yale man is "more downright, straightforward, and a little more naive."

The remaining letters pertain to Bowen's career as a writer. Correspondents include Bowen's publishers Bobbs-Merrill, Hastings House, and Oxford University Press; magazines for which he freelanced, including Coronet, Hudson River Magazine, Mademoiselle, Pageant, and Reader's Digest; and prospective subjects of articles, including Felix Frankfurter, Sigurd Larmon, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Robert A. Stranahan. Bowen's research for his first book, The Hudson, is documented in his 1938 correspondence with Carl Carmer. Although Bowen is best-known for his biography of Eugene O'Neill, the collection contains no correspondence with any member of the O'Neill family, and only two letters by Alexander Renner provide biographical information on O'Neill. Several correspondents do mention The Curse of the Misbegotten, including Barbara Battelle, Guy Hamelin, and Sister Mary Madelena.

Series II, Writings , is located in Boxes 2-4 and is divided into two alphabetically arranged sections, Books and Shorter Works. The Books section includes reviews of The Elegant Oakey and They Went Wrong, as well as publicity and photographs for The Hudson: Great River of the Mountains. Incomplete notes, draft typescripts, and galleys of Bowen's biography of Eugene O'Neill, The Curse of the Misbegotten, are located in Box 2, folders 33-43.

Shorter Works is divided into Articles, Book Reviews, and Scrapbooks. The numerous articles by Bowen illustrate his interests as a journalist. They include interviews with and reports on political figures such as Adlai Stevenson III, John F. Kennedy, Trygve Lie, and Douglas MacArthur; a series of profiles of advertising executives published in Madison Avenue; and a variety of human-interest stories such as "The Shy Cop Who Saw Two Flying Saucers." Bowen also contributed popular history articles such as "The Great Red Scare of 1920" and a biographical sketch of Lafcadio Hearn, "Death Unites Oriental and Yankee Who Went Buddhist for Love."

Bowen was best-known, however, as a crime reporter, and his work in this area is well-represented in the collection. The series contains copies of many of his articles on these topics, including two "Annals of Crime" columns from the New Yorker, his reports on the Brinks robbery, and articles on juvenile delinquency, shoplifting, and embezzlements.

Several of these crime articles appeared in Pageant magazine, to which Bowen frequently contributed during the 1950s. His report for them on the hazards of radiation, "The New Invisible Death Around Us," won the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Citation Award in 1956. Articles also contains the manuscript of "Poet into Historian," an appreciation of Carl Carmer, and proofs and galleys of "The Greatest Tragedy of Eugene O'Neill."

Book Reviews by Bowen are located in Box 4, folders 114-21, and include his review of Birdman of Alcatraz by Thomas A. Gaddis and of two books by John Bartlow Martin. The Scrapbooks of clippings, located in Box 9, folders 192-93, contain numerous signed and unsigned newspaper articles, mostly from PM.

Box 5 holds Series III, Personal Papers , which are alphabetically arranged. The series includes a high-schools yearbook of Shane O'Neill's; a portrait of Bowen taken by Margaret Bourke-White; publicity for the 1938 radio show, "Information Please;" and drafts of three articles by Carl Carmer.

Series IV, Printed Material , includes single issues of magazines, a bound volume of PM's Picture News, seven folders of Madison Avenue issues from the years 1958-63, and a pamphlet on the "Motion Picture Industry in War-Time America: 1943-1944."

Oversize material is located in Boxes 7-10 and has been arranged in series order. Included are eleven folders of photographs for Great River of the Mountains , scrapbooks of clippings, and a portrait of Croswell Boswen.

Other papers concerning the professional activities of Croswell Bowen are located at Choate-Rosemary Hall.