The Library’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections is pleased to announce that an important addition to its women’s collections, the papers of poet and writer Clinch Calkins, will be available to researchers when the Center reopens in its new home on the 5th floor of Lauinger Library in late March. Processing was recently completed for this generous donation from Julie Harris, Calkins’ daughter.
Marion Clinch Calkins was born in 1895 in Evansville, Wisconsin. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918, Calkins worked in a Milwaukee artillery shell packing plant, before returning to her alma mater to teach English and art history. Around this time, Calkins entered the annual poetry competition held by The Nation, submitting her poem “I Was a Maiden” under the name of Clinch Calkins because she wanted her authorship to be gender-neutral. Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor, awarded the poem third prize but did not publish it for fear that its content was too avant garde and would cost the magazine its mailing privileges. The poem was eventually published, together with Calkins’ early collected verse, in Poems (1928).
Although Calkins considered poetry to be her favorite literary medium, her most critically acclaimed work was Some Folks Won’t Work (1930), a seminal document on the Depression, based on 300 individual case histories of the effects of unemployment. Published the year following the Wall Street crash, the book received accolades on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and brought Calkins national attention along with an invitation from Harry Hopkins to work with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).
Other publications include the verse drama State Occasion; the poetry collection Strife of Love in a Dream; and the novels Lady On the Hunt and Calendar of Love.
The Clinch Calkins papers, comprising more than 100 boxes, are a valuable addition to the Booth Family Center for Special Collections’ holdings of the papers of distinguished 20th-century female writers. These include poets Katherine Biddle and Elizabeth Jennings; journalists and writers Anna Brady (first female journalist in the Vatican press corps), Marguerite Tjader Harris (founder of Direction magazine), Shirley Hazzard (novelist and friend of Graham Greene), Mary O’Hara (author of the Flicka children’s books), Lisa Sergio (pioneer female radio broadcaster), Edith Sitwell, and Barbara Ward (writer on humanitarian and economic issues).
The women’s collections in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections are a significant collection area and an invaluable research archive. In addition to those mentioned above, the collections include papers and work of women—many of whom were the first of their gender in their chosen fields—in art, civil and humanitarian rights, education, diplomacy, photography and performing arts. Learn more in the Special Collections Catalog or by contacting the Booth Family Center for Special Collections.