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  • Stuart Wright and Shelby Foote Papers Archived
  • Emily Schulten

Stuart Wright of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, faculty at the School of Education at Wake Forest University, is a prominent bibliophile and bibliographer of Southern authors. He owned the Palaemon Press Limited and published pamphlets, broadsides, and books in special and limited editions. He is retired now, living in Ludlow, England, according to a news release from East Carolina University.

Stuart Wright's lifetime collection recently became part of the permanent holdings of the J. Y. Joyner Library at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. The collection includes over 3,000 printed works, 5,000 manuscripts, and Wright's papers and personal correspondence, some of which includes poetry or fiction. The collection is still being processed and catalogued and is not yet available digitally online, but materials are available physically in the reading room.

Wright did some of the earliest bibliographies of southern writers, including James Dickey, Andrew Lytle, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, and Peter Taylor, calling attention to our contemporary artists during their lifetimes. Many items are available for future research: first editions; books with inscriptions; books by Cleanth Brooks, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, William Styron, and Eudora Welty; manuscript materials; broadsides, one by Faulkner, for example; single stories ("Black Butterfly" by Ransom, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren. One letter to Wright regarding Welty is from Lee Smith (date unknown) expressing gratitude for the invitation from Wright to a party at which Smith and Welty spoke.

As owner of Palaemon Press Limited (Winston-Salem, NC), Wright published several of Welty's works: Women!! Make Turban in Own Home (1979), a first edition run of 235; Bye-Bye Brevoort (1980), a first edition of three simultaneous issues totaling 476 copies; Retreat (1981), a first edition of simultaneous first, second, third, and fourth issues totaling 240 copies. Wright also arranged for the creation and printing of Twenty Photographs [End Page 198] (1980). (See Noel Polk, Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work, Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1994.) For Welty's seventy-fifth birthday (1984), Wright arranged for and published Eudora Welty: A Tribute with reminiscences from ten author friends, seventy-five copies.

Wright, also a bibliographer, wrote a note for the Eudora Welty Newsletter (VI.2 Summer 1982) regarding Place in Fiction published in 1957 by the Crown Octavo series of House of Books Ltd. (New York, NY). Several of these (three or more) were marked "out of series" but unnumbered. There were therefore three distinct Place in Fiction issues, those numbered 1-300, those lettered A-Z for publisher and author, and those marked "out of series" for the purposes of copyright.

In addition to the East Carolina University collection are the "Stuart Wright Papers," obtained in 1994 and archived in the Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These papers include 170 letters written from 1977 to 1986 to authors for whom Wright was publisher, editor, or translator (A. R. Ammons, Shelby Foote, O. B. Hardison, Robert Morgan, James Seay, Lee Smith, and Sylvia Wilkinson, for example) (www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/w/Wright,Stuart_T.html.)

Vanderbilt University also has Stuart Wright papers, primarily concerning Robert Penn Warren (www.library.vanderbilt.edu/speccol/wrights.shtml). The finding aid describes correspondence (Warren to George Core and Wright, Eleanor Clark to Wright), manuscripts, and ephemera by or regarding Warren. The collection ranges from 1896 (a photograph) to 1988 and includes more than 130 photographs of or relating to Warren. Although the finding aid does not name Eudora Welty, the material would certainly enrich the context in which Welty wrote.

This spring, Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, announced the acquisition of 2,350 books, personal papers, and manuscripts of Shelby Foote (1916-2005) to be housed at Barret Library. The papers include correspondence, memo books, calendars, manuscripts, and drafts of the novels and histories that Foote published. The writer's book collection contains many signed first editions, including ones by William Faulkner, Walker Percy, and Eudora Welty. (For further news about the acquisitions see www.rhodes.edu/news/20373.asp.)

Welty and Foote were acquainted through their mutual friendship with Walker Percy, and one can glean...

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