Scope and Content Note
The papers of Wesley Winans Stout (1890-1971) span the years 1913-1954 and consist essentially of a selection by Stout of the editorial files of the Saturday Evening Post, where he was associate editor, 1924-1936, and editor, 1937-1942. Only a part of the correspondence is Stout’s own. A substantial segment is that of his predecessor, George Horace Lorimer, whom Stout served as associate editor for thirteen years. Other addressees are Thomas B. Costain and Francis Churchill (“Churchie”) Williams of the Post editorial staff. A small number of items reflect Stout’s activities after leaving the Post.
Although, in a sense, an autograph collection, the correspondence is working correspondence of the Saturday Evening Post editors and concerns proposals, assignments, submission, acceptance, or rejection of articles and fiction for the magazine. There are more than one hundred prominent correspondents represented. Particularly notable correspondence exists for Joseph Alsop, Arthur (“Bugs”) Baer, Thomas Beer, Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, William Faulkner, Edna Ferber, Joseph Hergesheimer, De Wolf Hopper, Ring Lardner, John P. Marquand, Will Rogers and family, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert W. Service, and Julian Street. There is an original of a letter of William Jennings Bryan to Woodrow Wilson, 1913, and an exchange with Pierre Salinger in 1962 concerning a rumored first marriage of John F. Kennedy.