Amy Groesbeck papers

The Amy Groesbeck Papers contain poetry, drama, personal papers, and photographs documenting the life of Amy Groesbeck, a minor poet, playwright, and actress. The papers span the dates 1904-1961.

The papers begin with nine folders of poetry. As many of the alphabetically arranged titles ("Coney Island," "Manhattan Sequence") suggest, Groesbeck's poems are about New York City where she lived. She also wrote about friends. Excerpts from "Songs for My Brother and Other Poems," for example, were later published in Gerald Reynolds; a Memorial, which Groesbeck co-edited. Three folders of correspondence follow the poetry and primarily contain rejection notices from magazines, newspapers, and publishers, but there are acceptances from The Lyric, Quicksilver, and The West Indian Review and a contract from House of Falmouth to publish Gull Geometrics.

Three plays complete the Writings series: From Dusk to Dawn, Gift at Parting, and The Next Step. From Dusk to Dawn takes place in San Francisco during the 1880s and was Groesbeck's only play to be produced. Three folders accompanying the "Mellow Drama in Two Acts" contain programs, fliers, and publicity photographs. The Snarks, a New York women's club to which Groesbeck belonged, produced the play in 1955, followed by the Norton Gallery Players of Palm Beach, Florida in 1959.

Like many of her poems, Gift at Parting may have been an early creative writing assignment (Box 1, folder 8). The verse drama takes place in a prison ward on Blackwell's Island and is about the hatred between a nun and a dying woman. Harcourt Brace, Random House, and The MacMillan Company all rejected the play The Next Step l, a fantasy about race relations in the next world. Like Gift at Parting, it was never published or produced.

The Other Papers Series in Boxes 3-4 contains Groesbeck's collection of writings and letters by others as well as family photographs and an early journal. The series begins with a few odd letters including a July 16, 1959 letter from Fred Astaire to Seney Park. Groesbeck's personal correspondence with publishers about individual plays and poems is housed in the Writings series. Early Groesbeck family photographs of New York, Mexico, and Europe are arranged in two folders (Box 3, folders 34-35). The papers also include Groesbeck's interesting account of her trip from New York to the west coast by train and car in the summer of 1914. She illustrated her bound journal with postcards and maps. Groesbeck's collection of poetry and prose from magazines and newspapers, such as Time, Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald Tribune, complete the series. Though her poetry clippings include a few famous poets such as Ogden Nash and Robert Frost, they are mostly of friends and minor poets. Jeannette Chappell, Ann Marx, and Memory McGonigal, for example, annotated their poems with personal messages. A collection of articles and essays taken from Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair in the 1940s reflect Groesbeck's interest in poetry and war songs, and printed bulletins from St. George's Church, New York, reveal her religious concerns.