Rosey Pool Collection

About the
collection

Collection description

At her death in 1971, R!osey Pool’s papers represented five decades of correspondence and editorial work involving major black writers of North America, including Harlem Renaissance leading light Langston Hughes and cultural historian and writer W E B Du Bois. Pool also collected contemporaneous material (programmes, periodicals, exhibition catalogues) commemorating African-American movements in politics and art and her papers are rich in both primary and secondary source material as a result. The Collection is diverse in form and includes autograph, typescript and printed papers, photographs, tape recordings, letters, periodicals, scrapbooks, sheet music, gramophone records and visual art.

Pool enjoyed a lengthy correspondence with several leading black writers, most notably Owen Dodson, Langston Hughes and Chester Himes. A large typescript collection contains, among many other works, an edition of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (c.1955) in a binder, Owen Dodson’s Bayou Legend (1946), Langston Hughes’s The Gospel Glory: A passion play (1962) and Pool’s own 1969 study of W E B Du Bois, in Dutch with corrections. Other works by Pool herself include studies of different poets, a notebook on black women writers and papers given on subjects including rhyming slang and Harlem. A considerable collection of verse by black American poets includes manuscripts by Du Bois, LeRoi Jones, Robert Hayden and many others. Recorded material includes a wide selection of poets reading from their works: Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden are just three poets featured.

Archival history

The Rosey Pool Collection was donated to the University of Sussex in 1972, a year after Pool’s death, by her executor, Isa Isenburg. Further papers of Rosey Pool, including correspondence from the 1960s when her key anthologies appeared, are held at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.