Cohen, Octavus Roy

Typescripts, c. 1927

(AR 1755)

Octavus Roy Cohen was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1891. He graduated from Clemson College in 1911, Birmingham-Southern College in 1927, and practiced law in South Carolina. Cohen wrote for various newspapers including the Birmingham Ledger, Charleston News and Courier and Newark Morning Star. He wrote more than 50 novels, detective mysteries, and books of short stories, more than 20 motion picture screenplays, and at least one stage drama. He contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and other magazines and is best known for his detective fiction and for comic stories about African Americans. These stories, set in Birmingham, featured uncouth characters and exaggerated dialect. Cohen lived variously in South Carolina, Alabama, New York and California. He died in Los Angeles in 1959. This collection contains one autographed typescript for the short story “Hearts and Glowers,” published in the October 8, 1927 edition of The Saturday Evening Post.

Size: 1 box

Finch, Lucine Gordon

Manuscripts

(AR 1575)

Lucine Finch was a poet, dramatist, graphic artist, and magazine storywriter born in Alabama in 1875. Finch published a number of books, articles, and poems including "The Butterfly" and "A Sermon in Patchwork." Her last known published writings date from 1917. This collection contains two short stories, The Darkey and the Deed and Mammy's Past Crust, the first written by Lucine Finch and the second written by her mother, Julia Neely Finch in the early twentieth century. Both stories illustrate stereotypes of African Americans common in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Size: 1 box

Gaines, Charles

Papers, 1965-1980

(AR 593)

Charles Gaines was born in 1942, in Florida. He graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 1963 and earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1967. Gaines served as director of the federal Title III Operation Arts program in Green Bay, Wisconsin for two years before accepting a position as associate professor of creative writing at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire in 1970. He resigned in 1976 to take up writing full time. Gaines' writing explores the psychology and practice of sports, especially body building. His first novel, Stay Hungry (1972), is set in Birmingham and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Gaines later co-authored the screenplay for the 1976 film Stay Hungry. Gaines's other books include Pumping Iron (1974), Staying Hard (1975), Dangler (1976), and writing for Esquire, Playboy, Geo, Harper's, Outside, Architectural Digest, Fly-Fisherman, and Sports Illustrated. The papers include correspondence, notes, photographs, and manuscripts of the novels Staying Hard, Stay Hungry, Pumping Iron, and Dangler.

Size: 5 boxes

Graves, John Temple, II

Papers, 1903, 1908, 1929-1961

(AR 830)

John Temple Graves, II was a Birmingham newspaper columnist and author. Following work in Washington on the Federal Trade Commission and in New York and Florida as a newspaper journalist and editor, Graves moved in 1929 to Birmingham, Alabama to work for the Birmingham Age-Herald. In 1946 he moved to the Birmingham Post, and following the merger of the two newspapers he worked for the Birmingham Post-Herald until his death. His daily column was syndicated to western and southern newspapers and he served as a correspondent for the New York Times. Graves was active in politics and was in demand as a lecturer, focusing much of his speaking and editorializing on southern ideology. Considered a southern liberal early in his career, Graves by the 1950s had become a spokesman for the White Citizens' Council, an advocate of States' Rights, and an opponent of federal intervention in the southern race question. He authored several books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Fighting South (1943). Graves died in 1961. The papers include correspondence, newspaper clippings, booklets, three scrapbooks, a manuscript of an unpublished novel (“The Ticket to Nowhere”), and typed drafts of his newspaper bylines and speeches. Graves corresponded with many leading newspaper editors and their letters to him address issues of race relations, the U. S. Supreme Court, states' rights, the change in voting laws, northern attitudes toward the South, and the southern economy.

Size: 2 boxes

Graves, John Temple, II

Scrapbooks, 1929-

(AR 154)

Newspaper clippings of Graves’ “This Morning” and “This Afternoon” columns written for the Birmingham Age-Herald, Birmingham Post, and Birmingham Post-Herald.

Size: 5 volumes

Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer

Papers

(AR 816)

Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton worked as a reporter for the Birmingham News in the 1940s and later taught history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of several books, including Hugo Black: The Alabama Years, Lister Hill: Statesman from the South and Seeing Historic Alabama. This collection contains correspondence, photographs, interview notes and other material relating to Hamilton’s research on Black, Hill, Selma and Alabama history.

Size: 16 boxes

Jackson, Emory O.

Letters to Anne Rutledge, 1940-1975

(AR 1460)

Anne Rutledge was a student of Jackson's at Westfield High School. They remained friends and corresponded with each other for 35 years. Rutledge earned degrees from Alabama State University, Tuskegee, and Alabama A&M and made her career as a teacher, including 19 years as a history and political science professor at A&M. She retired in 1986 and lives in Huntsville, Alabama. Rutledge has published several books of poetry including Double the Pleasure in 1988. These letters from Jackson address a variety of issues including Jackson's career and involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and Rutledge's career as an artist and a teacher. The collection also includes a poem by Jackson called "I am the Negro Press" and a newspaper clipping on Rutledge.

Size: 1 box

Jackson, Emory O.

Papers, 1965-1975

(AR 70)

Emory Overton Jackson was born in Buena Vista, Georgia in 1908. His family moved to Birmingham in 1919, and Jackson attended Industrial High School (now Parker High School). After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1932, Jackson taught at Carver High School in Dothan, Alabama, and at Westfield in Jefferson County. He served in World War II, and became the managing editor of the Birmingham World, Alabama's largest and oldest African-American newspaper, in 1941. He remained editor for the rest of his life. Jackson promoted voter registration, equal job opportunities and education for African Americans, and served on many boards and agencies, including Birmingham's Industrial Development Board. He was one of the founders of the Alabama Conference of NAACP Branches, and he served on the board of directors for the Fourth Avenue YMCA and the Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity. Jackson died in Birmingham on September 10, 1975. The bulk of this collection is made up of material related to Emory Jackson's death. The collection also includes some personal correspondence, awards, honors, citations, membership cards, college and fraternity material, photographs, and editorials from the Birmingham World. Significantly more material relating to Jackson is found in the collection Birmingham World Office Files (AR 1102).

Size: 3 boxes

Johnston, Betty White

Letters from S.J. Perelman, 1931-1953 and 1983

(AR 1598)

Betty White Johnson was a Birmingham writer and artist. Her novel I Lived This Story was produced as the 1931 motion picture Confessions of a Coed. This collection contains letters written to White by humorist and writer S. J. Perelman.

Size: 1 box

Koenig, Frederick G.

Short Stories and Poetry

(AR 1582)

Frederick Koenig was a lawyer, manufacturing executive, and an active member of the Birmingham business community. Born in 1915 in Birmingham, Koenig earned a bachelor’s degree from Birmingham-Southern College in 1935 and an LL.B. from Harvard University in 1938. He worked as a lawyer in Birmingham until he enlisted in the U.S. Infantry in 1942. Koenig returned to Birmingham in 1946 and worked for Alabama By-Products, the company he remained with for the rest of his life. He served on various boards and as the director of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. He died in Birmingham in 1978. This collection contains a form rejection letter from The New Yorker and one bound volume of typescripts of stories and poetry relating to World War II entitled “War Stories and Poems.” The stories were probably written in the 1940s when Koenig was in the Infantry and then working for the Tennessee Valley Authority. At least one of the poems may have been written while he was a student at Harvard in the late 1930s. None of the material is dated, but most of the stories have return addresses. The stories and poems are about espionage, love, and betrayal, and are populated with handsome men in uniform and alluring women either mourning a soldiers’ departure or themselves agents in international intrigue.

Size: 1 volume and 1 file

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