The Authors Collection is comprised of bibliographies of women writers, both from the U.S. and abroad; general files on women authors by country; and files on individual authors and poets. In a few cases there are typescripts of an author's works, photographs, biographical information, newspaper clippings, and some reviews. The collection dates approximately from 1845 to 1976. Individual authors represented include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tillie Olsen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Virginia Woolf, among others. There is one complete manuscript, How to Make Love to a Man in Five Languages, by Doris Lilly. A substantial section on Margaret Mitchell includes newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and correspondence about Mitchell, the publication of Gone With the Wind, the release of the movie, and efforts of the Atlanta Smith Club to raise money for Margaret Mitchell scholarships to send Georgia women to Smith. Correspondence includes letters from Mitchell to Julia Collier Harris and her husband Julian Harris (circa 1936-47), both newspaper editors who, together, received the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for their editorials in the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun against the Ku Klux Klan.

This collection is organized into four series:

• I. GENERAL
• II. COUNTRIES
• III. INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS
• IV. POETRY