Adjunct Descriptive Data

Ben Ames Williams, author of short stories and novels, was born in Macon, Mississippi in 1889. His mother, Sarah Marshall Ames, was the niece of James Longstreet (1821-1904), General of the Confederate Army. Williams was raised in Jackson, Ohio, where his father was a journalist. Williams came East for his education, which he completed at Dartmouth College in the Class of 1910. That same year he commenced a brief career (1910-16) as a journalist for the Boston American; concurrently writing and submitting short stories to magazines. He published his first short story around 1914, his first novel (actually two of these) in 1919.

Williams married Florence Tafton Talpey of York, Maine in 1912. Three children were born: Penelope Ann, Roger Chilton (Dartmouth, Class of `36), and Ben Ames, Jr. (Dartmouth, Class of `38). The author died in 1953, having just completed The Unconquered. These papers cover in great detail Williams' final production. They include, as well as a variety of correspondence, essential research carried out for him, principally by Louise Hubert Guyol (b.c. 1878, fl. 1954) of New Orleans, author of two best-selling children's novels.

The author's belief in “the potency of place” is reflected in his output, which may be seen to recapitulate his own heritage and the locales in which he lived, not the least of which was his Maine summer residence. One hundred and twenty-five of his short stories and seven or eight of his novels are set in Maine. Williams' late opera, House Divided (1947) and The Unconquered (1953), deal with the South during and after the Civil War. The scene of Owen Glen (1950) is a small Ohio mining town at the turn of the century. Besides his thirty-eight novels, some appearing later in a dozen translations, Williams published nearly four hundred short stories, a number of these in serial versions.

Many of these papers were apparently sent in installments to Dartmouth College by the author, who corresponded with the library during the entire course of his career. These papers comprise a collection of twenty-five Paige Miracle boxes, two Hollinger boxes and five large portfolios. Applicable correspondence was filed with the manuscript, as were notebooks (when assignable to a single work).