Scope and Content Note
The papers of Joseph Warren Beach (1880-1957) span the years 1891-1955. The collection consists of correspondence, diaries, subject files, manuscripts of speeches, articles, books, and poems, and notes for classroom lectures. The papers are organized into six series: Diaries and Notebooks; General Correspondence; Family Correspondence ; Subject File; Book, Article, Poetry, and Lecture File; and Miscellany .
Correspondence with members of Beach's family includes letters exchanged with his sons, Warren Beach and Northrop Beach, his second wife, Dagmar Doneghy, and numerous relatives. Of particular interest in the Family Correspondence are the letters written by Warren Beach, director of the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, California.
The General Correspondence contains numerous letters from author Robert Penn Warren and professor Elmer Edgar Stoll, a teaching associate of Beach's at the University of Minnesota. Other correspondents include James T. Farrell, George Lyman Kittredge, Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wilbur.
A large Subject File contains notes assembled by Beach during the many years he was a member of the English faculty at the University of Minnesota and concerns American and European literary figures. The notes pertain to biographical facts, discussions of literary style, and analyses of individual literary works. Among the authors covered in greatest detail are Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Meredith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Wolfe, and William Wordsworth.
Among the writings in the collection are manuscripts of six books written by Beach, including The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry and The Making of the Auden Canon, and a large file of histories and articles. There are also a great number of Beach's poems, many of which were published in such periodicals as Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly, and the Hudson Review.