Grace Kellogg was born in 1885 in Bangor, Maine. Her mother, Eva Mary Crosby Kellogg, was a travel book writer, and her father was a minister. Grace Kellogg grew up in Boston and attended Brookline High School. She got her start as a professional writer at age eight when Success Magazine paid her five dollars and published one of her poems. When she was seventeen, her first novel was serialized in The National Magazine. Kellogg majored in English and graduated from Smith College in 1908. While there, she was the editor-in-chief of the Smith College Monthly. She lived in Istanbul and taught English at the American College for Girls from 1910-13, when she married D. Griffith, an American instructor at Roberts College. Over the next ten years, Kellogg lived in New York and New Jersey, supported woman suffrage, worked in Margaret Sanger's office, had two sons and two daughters, worked as a journalist, and published several novels, including Arise and Go, The Beloved Tenant, Crosbys of Henry County Illinois, The House and The Silent Drum. She married her second husband, C.F. Shaw in 1936. After the death of her third husband Clarendon Waite Smith, whom she had married in 1942, Kellogg Smith returned to school at the University of Vermont where she earned an M.A. in 1953. A revised version of her master's thesis, "The Two Lives of Edith Wharton," was published in 1965. Late in her life, Kellogg Smith was a member of Women Strike for Peace and of the Committee for Non-Violent Action. She died July 26, 1987.

The Grace Kellogg Smith Papers is 3 linear ft. and consists primarily of biographical materials, research files on Edith Wharton, and the materials regarding publication of The Two Lives of Edith Wharton (1965). Biographical materials include scrapbooks of notes about, and photographs of, Smith and her family. The EdithWharton research material includes notes and drafts of her 1953 master's thesis; and notes, drafts, a manuscript, correspondence, and reviews related to the publication of The Two Lives of Edith Wharton. Other material in the collection includes correspondence about, and a copy of, her novels Arise and Go, The Beloved Tenant, Crosbys of Henry County Illinois, The House and The Silent Drum. The collection also includes articles she wrote for the Provincetown (Mass.) Advocate during the 1960s among others.

The collection is comprised mostly of manuscripts written from 1907 to 1953. Included are newspaper columns, published and unpublished stories, novels, plays, and other miscellaneous written material. The scrapbooks include clippings of correspondence, reviews from the New York Times and the Boston Evening Transcript, among others, and columns from Elizabeth Daily Journal dated between 1923-26. The bulk of the correspondence dates from 1963 to 1977. Correspondence makes up only a small portion of the collection. Included are exchanges with the Sophia Smith Collection regarding the acquisition of her collection. Notable correspondents include Margaret Grierson, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis.

This collection is organized into three series:

• I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS and CORRESPONDENCE
• II. WRITINGS
• III. SCRAPBOOKS