The papers of Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) span the years 1862-1997, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1930-1988. The collection covers all facets of Luce's career and personal relationships and includes family and personal papers, correspondence, and secretarial, literary, and speech files. Public service files contain congressional and ambassadorial papers and records of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Subject files reflect Luce's involvement in political, civic, social, philanthropic, and religious organizations. An Addition documents the last years of Luce's life, her death, memorial services, and the closing of her estate. Formerly closed and restricted material have been placed in separate series. Scrapbooks are available only in a microfilm edition.

Clare Boothe Luce was a public official and social critic who expressed her views in private correspondence; fiction and plays; political and social commentary; newspaper, magazine, and editorial work; and on the lecture circuit. She was conscious of having achieved success in the male-dominated fields of politics and publishing and became an advocate for expanded public roles for women. International relations was her principal political emphasis. Religion became another concern after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946.

Luce collected family and other personal papers with the intention of writing memoirs, a venture she never completed. Her family collection includes three mid-nineteenth century diaries of her grandfather, John W. T. Boothe, a Baptist minister from Maryland. She survived her parents, brother, daughter, and husband Henry Luce and saved many of their papers. Henry Luce's papers include correspondence with Clare Boothe Luce, general and "V.I.P." correspondence, scrapbooks, speeches, Time-Life memoranda, a will, and writings. Other material in the Family and Personal Papers series relates to Henry Luce as well. Much of the family correspondence is addressed jointly to both Luces. In addition, personal and real property was often held in common. The art files, for example, contain business and provenance records which include correspondence with notable artists such as surrealists Philip Curtis and Frida Kahlo. Henry Luce also collected Asian antiques. Clare Luce's own amateur works in painting, mosaic, and needlepoint are also documented in the art file. These records together with appointment books, entertainment files, and financial and property records document the couple's personal interests and activities.

Although correspondence comprising the bulk of Clare Boothe Luce's papers is found in every series, it is concentrated in the Correspondence series containing letters of a general and personal nature. Luce spoke and wrote on controversial topics to a mass audience and received a great deal of mail in response, especially during presidential campaigns and following her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946. She also corresponded with friends and colleagues on politics, religion, and literary or artistic undertakings. Correspondents include Bernard M. Baruch, William Benton (1900-1973), William F. Buckley, Carlos Chávez, May-ling Soong Chiang, Gerald Heard, John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Joseph P. Kennedy (1888-1969), John Davis Lodge, Joseph W. Martin (1884-1968), John Courtney Murray, Fulton J. Sheen, Spyros Skouras, Clarence K. Streit, Mark Sullivan (1874-1952), Arthur H. Vandenberg, and Darryl Francis Zanuck.

Luce employed a secretarial staff to assist with her literary and public service endeavors and to make arrangements for travel, social activities, and household management. Communications between Luce and her secretaries and their communications with others on Luce's behalf are organized chronologically in the Secretarial File.

The Literary File documents Luce's career as a journalist and playwright. She became an editor at Vanity Fair magazine in 1930 as Clare Boothe Brokaw and corresponded with many leading writers, journalists, artists, and politicians. Vanity Fair correspondence, suggestions for articles, reports, and staff memoranda are included in the business records of the Literary File. The business records also include correspondence with agents, editors, publishers, attorneys, accountants, theatrical directors, and producers about work in progress or proposed work. Production records are available for Luce's plays, The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939). There are no working drafts of The Women , only one scene description and other notes. The acting script for the 1936 Philadelphia tryout of The Women has been preserved, however, as have scripts for many of the international productions of the play.

Luce published numerous articles and editorials in various magazines and newspapers. She wrote extensively in the late 1940s and early 1950s on religious themes. Her conversion is detailed in a 1947 McCall's magazine series, "The Real Reason." She also compiled and edited a book of essays by famous Roman Catholics, Saints for Now (New York and London, 1952). She experimented with LSD under the tutelage of Gerald Heard and Sidney Cohen (1910- ) and scuba-diving, which she described as the "Heaven Below" in a series of Sports Illustrated articles.

Luce gave speeches and appeared at campaign rallies for Republican presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie in New York and Connecticut. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms, serving from 1943 until 1947. Her congressional files consist largely of correspondence relating to speeches and statements related to World War II, economic and labor issues, the administration of price controls, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Material concerning her battlefront tours with the House Committee on Military Affairs is located in the Office File subseries. Her 1945 correspondence concerns issues related to the end of World War II, such as the problems of demobilization and proposals for peacetime conscription or universal military service. By volume, the greatest issue in the 1946 correspondence is the shortage of women's stockings. William Hager, vice president of Hager & Brothers of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, directed interested citizens to contact Congresswoman Luce. Letters came to her office from across the country stating that the stocking situation was desperate and asking that the government reinstate orders compelling the producers of rayon yarn to sell to hosiery manufacturers. In 1945-1946, Luce employed the services of public relations consultant Edward L. Bernays, who advised her on sensitive issues such as the controversy that arose when the Daughters of the American Revolution, of which Luce was a member, refused to admit African Americans to Constitution Hall.

Luce declined to run for a third congressional term. Though she never held elective office again, she was appointed to several public service positions by Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Luce served as ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956. Papers from this period include correspondence, much of it in Italian, from political leaders, dignitaries, and Italian citizens; briefing and press reports; records relating to missions, investigations, and projects undertaken by the embassy; interoffice memoranda and other State Department documents; and entertainment and other files concerning the operation of Villa Taverna, the official residence of the American ambassador in Rome. Papers concerning the Trieste crisis include narrative accounts and reports. Eisenhower nominated Luce as ambassador to Brazil in 1959, but she withdrew before taking office when her public remarks about Senator Wayne Morse during her confirmation hearings aroused considerable controversy. The nomination is documented in reports, memoranda, and political cartoons. Later files relate to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

The Speech File includes congressional campaign speeches and remarks on legislation and other governmental actions. Luce spoke in behalf of Republican candidates after joining the party in 1940, gave religious testimony, and opposed communism in the 1950s and 1960s. She wrote most of her own speeches, though at times she solicited advice from policy experts and editorial advice from her husband.

The Subject File series also reflects Luce's involvement in politics and public policy, journalism and publishing, philanthropy and religion, and civic and social interests. Luce's early political activities are documented in folders concerning her involvement in the New National party movement of 1932 and her 1934 appointment to the National Recovery Administration's Code Authority for the Motion Picture Industry. Later files document her nomination at the Connecticut Republican convention for the senatorial race in 1952 and her proposed nomination by the New York Conservative party for the Senate in 1964. Luce's involvement in public policy institutions, especially during the 1980s, included the American Enterprise Institute, American Security Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Committee on the Present Danger, Council of American Ambassadors, Heritage Foundation, International Rescue Committee, United States Strategic Institute, and the World Strategy Network.

Republican party and presidential campaign records and additional papers concern the presidential administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan. Her work with the board of editors for the Encyclopedia Britannica and a copy of the 1942 judicial decision in Corcoran vs. Time with reference to her 1931 proposal at Vanity Fair to create a photographic magazine called Life document some of her involvements in journalism and publishing. Subject files also relate to her religious conversion and the founding and operation of a Cistercian-Trappist monastery at Mepkin Plantation in South Carolina on property donated by the Luces in 1949.

Material which had been restricted is filed in separate series. The larger series, which had been closed until 1997, contains papers related to every series in the collection organized in a parallel arrangement to the open series. A smaller series of papers foemrly restricted contains Family and Personal Papers and Correspondence.

Lola Sybil Cooper served as Luce’s personal secretary in 1986-1987 and continued as an employee of the estate until 1989. Cooper donated office files in 2015 which comprise the Addition to Luce’s papers. The Addition is organized in six subseries to mirror the arrangement of the main body of Luce’s papers: Estate Records, Family and Personal Papers, Correspondence, Secretarial File, Literary File, and Subject File. The material is dated 1937-1997 with the majority concentrated in the period 1984-1987, years Luce lived and died in Washington, D.C., and was associated with the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan as an advisor and political commentator with a conservative Republican perspective. The Secretarial File documents a busy calendar of political activities, speaking events, galas, and social occasions. The Family and Personal Papers provide documentation on Luce’s style of living during her final years as well as a file of her own artwork which includes sketches, paintings, collages, and photographs of her mixed-media art. Luce’s artwork is an enterprise in self-discovery, a vehicle for exploring her own psyche, life, and times. She produced most of the items documented in the file during her soul-searching years in the 1950s and 1960s. Luce’s illness and death on October 9, 1987, from cancer, her funeral, memorial services and commemorative events are documented throughout the Addition, most especially in the Secretarial File and Subject File. Extensive Estate Records document the two-plus year effort to dispose of her property and close her estate. The Correspondence, Literary File, and Subject File contain incidental and supplementary items to augment the principal series in the collection.