Harrison Griswold Dwight, author, was born in Constantinople, Turkey in 1875. He prepared for Amherst College at the preparatory school of Robert College, Constantinople, with which his father was connected, and St. Johnsbury, Vermont Academy. After graduation from Amherst, he entered the consular service. In 1918 he was translator with the American Section of the Supreme War Council at Versailles. In 1919 he was secretary to General Tasker Bliss at the peace Conference in Paris.

For several years he was assistant drafting officer in the State Department, Washington, DC. Later he joined the protocol division. He was assistant director of the Frick Collection in New York from 1935 to 1947.

His published works include four volumes of short stories: Constantinople, Old and New, 1913; Stamboul Nights, 1916; Persian Miniatures, 1917; The Emperor of Elam and Other Stories, 1930; and numerous magazine articles in Harper's Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and National Geographic. One of his stories, "In the Pasha's Garden," was the subject of an opera produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1934. His reviews of books and poems appeared regularly in magazines and newspapers.

Dwight died in Holyoke, Mass., on March 24, 1959.

The collection contains a sizable body of letters to Dwight from friends and publishers, as well as a group of letters from Dwight to several other friends. Also there are manuscripts of some of the articles he wrote for magazines and one of the projected books he worked on about L'Enfant, the planner of the city of Washington, DC. There is a miscellaneous section that contains various items of interest, such as family photographs, notes, etc.

Well known persons included in the correspondence (letters to Dwight) include John Dos Passos (4 letters), Gilbert Grosvenor, Willa Cather (13), Stark Young, Arnold Toynbee (5), Alice B. Toklas (3), Otis Skinner, Harold J. Laski (1), Archibald MacLeish (1), Edith Wharton (3), William Dean Howells (2), President Calvin Coolidge (1), President Herbert Hoover (1), Eleanor Roosevelt (1), Wendell Wilkie (1), Hugh Wiley (5), Talcott Williams (4), and Willa Cather to Mary Willard (2) (December 25, 1941 and Jan. 10, 1942, in letters to Dwight). Other correspondents are much more prolific, having as many as twenty to thirty letters in some cases.

This collection is organized into five series:

• 1. Correspondence, 1893-1959
• 2. Printed articles, 1925-1940
• 3. Manuscripts, 1890-1926
• 4. Notebooks and Diaries, 1897-1959
• 5. Miscellaneous, 1898-1958