Scope and Content Note
The papers of James Mallahan Cain (1892-1977) span the years 1901-2004, with the bulk of the items concentrated in the period 1925-1978. The collection is divided into Parts A, B, and C and includes three small portions, Parts D, E, and F, added in 1993, 1995, and 2013. Parts A and B contain six series each: Family Papers, General Correspondence, Writings, Financial Records, Legal File, and Miscellany. The first two parts are closely related and overlap chronologically. For example, a copy of a Cain letter might be in Part A, while the original of the reply is located in Part B. For the convenience of readers using Part B, therefore, the organization of the two parts is the same. Parts C through F were separate additions to the collection and consist chiefly of correspondence, financial and legal records, and writings that supplement Parts A and B of the collection. Part F also includes correspondence and other papers of Cain’s literary executor, Alice M. Piper, documenting her endeavors in that capacity.
Best known today for his hard-bitten "tough guy" novels, Cain was already past forty when he published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). It was an instant best-seller. Before that he had trained as an opera singer, but failing, as he said, to make the grade, he drifted briefly into the insurance business, tried several years of college teaching, and then became a journalist in 1919. In Baltimore, where he worked for two city dailies and wrote occasional pieces for the American Mercury, Cain met H. L. Mencken. Though sparse for Cain's early years, the letters in the Family Papers and General Correspondence series give valuable information about most aspects of his entry into journalism. The earliest exchange with Mencken in the collection is dated 1930, but the previous decade is represented by the numerous reminiscences that Cain furnished to scholars, friends, and literary acquaintances.
Also in the papers is retrospective evidence of the six years, 1924-1931, Cain spent as editor of the New York World. Especially significant is his post-1930s correspondence with and about Walter Lippmann, Arthur Krock, B. A. Bergman, and Herbert Bayard Swope. The paper folded in 1929, and after ten unhappy months as editorial helpmate ("26th Jesus," he called it) at Harold Ross's New Yorker, Cain left for Hollywood. Writing screenplays, his appointed task, soon disillusioned him, but the salaries were generous and in Southern California he found the time and material to complete his novels. Included in the Writings series are early holographs, typescripts, proofs, and other manuscripts of Cain's many novels, shorter fiction, film scripts, stage plays, and numerous nonfiction pieces. Among the more significant manuscripts are those of his unfinished autobiography and the various drafts of Postman, Past All Dishonor, Mignon, and The Institute.
The richest part of the collection is the General Correspondence series. The letters are longer and more numerous after 1948, when Cain was married to former opera singer Florence Macbeth and moved to Hyattsville, Maryland. Among the correspondents are Charles Angoff, E. Manchester Boddy, Joan Crawford, Ruth Goetz, Allan Nevins, Seán O'Faoláin, Samson Raphaelson and Dorshka (Dorothy Wegman) Raphaelson, Edward G. Robinson, Laurence Stallings, Barbara Stanwyck, Rebecca West, and Katharine Sergeant Angell White and E. B. White. In later years, Cain wrote frequently about the giants of literature he had met -- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and Michael Arlen. Among a younger generation of writers with whom he corresponded were Tom Wolfe (a Cain revivalist), David Madden, Gore Vidal, and Joyce Carol Oates. Also in the collection are the letters of Huntington Cairns, Raymond Chandler, James T. Farrell, Wolcott Gibbs, La Nora Griffith, Arthur Hornblow (1893-1976), Paul Hume, E. J. Kahn, Constance Cummings Levy, Carey McWilliams, Gilbert Malcolm, Morris Markey, Hamilton Owens, Wheeler Sammons, Robert B. Sinclair, and Edmund Wilson.
Another topic reflected in these papers is the business aspect of Cain's more than four decades in the writing trade, as documented in income tax records, royalty statements, and correspondence with publishing concerns and agents such as Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., H. N. Swanson, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates. The correspondence with Knopf (both Alfred and Blanche) is personal as well as professional, chronicling Cain's progress as a writer. In the 1940s he led a controversial fight to protect authors' rights and earnings through a centralized authority that would represent writers in the courts, in contract negotiations, and in congressional legislation. Information on this effort is located throughout the General Correspondence. In the Legal File are documents regarding a law suit against Cain for alleged plagiarism, a case he won, and some material pertaining to obscenity cases that plagued him and other writers of the 1930s and 1940s.
Cain was married four times. There is a substantial amount of correspondence with his second and third wives, Elina Sjöstedt Tyszecka and Aileen Pringle, a silent-screen star, but the largest portion of the family papers concerns his fourth wife Florence Macbeth's singing career and the personal and financial papers from her previous marriage. Another topic of importance is Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland, where Cain studied and taught and where his father, James William Cain, was president. The elder Cain wrote an unpublished manuscript on the financial history of the United States that his son donated to the Library of Congress as a separate collection.