| Creator | Sypher, Wylie, 1904-1987 |
| Title | Wiley Sypher papers |
| Dates | 1924-(1953-1975)-1986 |
| Identification | MS 34 |
| Quantity | 17.5 linear feet (29 manuscript containers, 4 record cartons and 1 oversize box) |
| Collection Abstract | The Wylie Sypher papers cover the period from 1924 to 1986 and document the academic and professional life of F. Wylie Sypher, a professor of English at Simmons College, Boston, Massachuestts, and at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Sypher was also a prolific author of scholarly texts, articles, essays, and book reviews. The collection documents the process Sypher used in gathering teaching materials for various courses. The collection also documents the scholarship Sypher exercised during the research process prior to writing and, through correspondence with editors, how various of his writing evolved from the idea stage to a published text. |
| Historical Abstract | F. Wylie Sypher (1905-1987) was a professor of English and taught for more than fifty years at Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts. From 1938 to 1986, Sypher also wrote numerous scholarly articles, essays, book reviews, nine critical texts, and delivered over forty speeches, addresses, and lectures. |
| Language | Material in English. |
| Location | Collection may be stored offsite. Please contact Archives staff for more information. |
Collection is open.
Requests for permission to publish material from this collection should be discussed with the College Archivist.
Please contact the College Archivist with requests to publish any material from the collection.
[Identification of item: description and date], Wylie Sypher Papers, MS 34, Simmons College Archives, Boston, MA, USA.
The bulk of the Wylie Sypher Papers were donated to the Simmons College Archives by Wylie Sypher in 1982. Some additional materials were donated and added to the papers in 1986 and 1987. A small amount of materials was added in 1992 from a donation by Prof. Lawrence Langer.
Accession number: 82.021, 88.024, 88.035, 89.007, 92.040
Processed by Claire Goodwin. Supervising Archivists: Megan Sniffin-Marinoff and Peter Carini.
This collection guide was encoded as part of the LEADS project by Meghan Poepping, March 2014.
F. Wylie Sypher (1905-1987) was a professor of English and taught for more than fifty years at Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts. From 1938 to 1986, Sypher also wrote numerous scholarly articles, essays, book reviews, nine critical texts, and delivered over forty speeches, addresses, and lectures.
A 1927 graduate of Amherst College, Sypher received a master of arts degree from Tufts College (later Tufts University) in 1929. In August 1929, he married Lucy Johnston, who, along with him, was one of the first four teaching fellows in English at Tufts. (Lucy Johnston Sypher later became an author of children's books.) At Harvard University, he received a master of arts in 1932 and a doctorate in 1937; he also received honorary degrees from Amherst, Middlebury, and Simmons Colleges.
Joining the Simmons College faculty in 1928, Sypher became an instructor in English in 1931, an assistant professor of English in 1936, an associate professor of English in 1941, and a professor of English in 1945, a position he held until his retirement from full-time teaching in 1973. Upon retirement, Sypher became a part-time lecturer in English and guided the development of the graduate studies in English programs until his second, and final, retirement in 1981. (See Appendix D for a listing of courses, by year, taught by Sypher at Simmons.)
In addition to teaching "Shakespeare," "Criticism," and other literature courses, Sypher was named Chairman of the Division of Language, Literature, and the Arts in 1945 and headed the Division until 1966, at which time the Division was restructured. He was then named Chairman of the Department of English in 1966, a position he held until July 1, 1972. He also established two master's degree programs: master of arts in English in 1966 and master of philosophy in English in 1973. Simmons honored Sypher in 1966 when he was named the first recipient of the Alumnae Endowed Chair and again in 1973 with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree.
Along with Waldo Emerson Palmer, a Simmons College professor of History, Sypher was founder and editor of Essays and Studies, a semi-annual publication of student papers written for specific courses. The journal has been published continuously since November 1943.
Sypher also taught summers at the University of Minnesota (1945), the University of Wisconsin (1948 and 1951), and the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont (1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, and 1963 to 1975). In 1967, Sypher was named the first Robert Frost Professor of Literature at Bread Loaf.
Sypher was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, 1950-51 and 1959, during which times he researched and began Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700 (1955) and Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (1960).
He was also the author or editor of seven additional texts: Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (1942); Enlightened England: An Anthology of English Literature from Dryden to Blake (1947); Comedy (1956); Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (1962); Art History (1963); Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision (1968); and The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (1976).
Many of these works were translated for publication into other languages: Spanish, Italian, Czech, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. Sypher also wrote the introduction for The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning (1961). Periodicals which published his articles, essays, and book reviews include: Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The American Scholar, and The Sewanee Review.
Sypher was a member of the Arts and Letters Committee for the National Book Awards, 1967.
(The reader is referred to the 1978-79 edition of Who's Who in America and The Boston Globe, August 18, 1967 for additional biographical details (copies on file))
The Wylie Sypher papers cover the period from 1924 to 1986 and document the academic and professional life of F. Wylie Sypher, a professor of English at Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts and at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Sypher was also a prolific author of scholarly texts, articles, essays, and book reviews. The collection documents the process Sypher used in gathering teaching materials for various of his courses. The collection also documents the scholarship Sypher exercised during the research process prior to writing and, through correspondence with editors, how various of his writings evolved from the idea stage to a published text.
The bulk of the collection focuses on Sypher's writing and teaching activities from 1953 to 1975. The collection contains: Sypher's undergraduate and graduate college papers; correspondence, drafts and final versions of manuscripts; drafts, final versions and published copies of articles, essays and book reviews; speeches and addresses; unpublished lectures; research materials and cards; course and teaching materials; photographs obtained for several of his works; and a portion of his personal library. The collection does not contain published editions of Sypher's nine scholarly texts, catalogued elsewhere in the Simmons College Archives.
The Sypher papers constitute 17.5 linear feet and are housed in twenty-nine manuscript boxes, one oversize box containing oversized journals, and four record cartons containing publications from Sypher's book collection.
The records are arranged into sixteen series: Personal Records, Correspondence, Programs, Course and Teaching Materials, Speeches and Addresses, Unpublished Lectures, Research Notes and Reading Cards, Articles and Essays, Book Reviews, Manuscripts, Manuscript Photographs, Reviews of Sypher Works, Materials from Publications, Published Articles and Essays, Published Book Reviews, and Publications from Sypher's Library.
The bulk of the Personal Records series contains undergraduate and graduate papers written at St. Stephen's College, Amherst College, Tufts College, and Harvard University.
The Correspondence series documents Sypher's professional associations with editors and advisers such as Jason Epstein, Andrew Chiappe, and Joseph Epstein. It also documents his associations with the director, colleagues, and students of the Bread Loaf program; his associations with Simmons College administrators, colleagues, and students; and his associations with literary figures, historians, and colleagues at other institutions such as Frederick Artz, Herschel Baker, Klaus Berger, Sir Edmund K. Chambers, Elizabeth Drew, Moses Hadas, Eugen Ciuca, Fiske Kimball, Lewis Mumford, and Lionel Trilling, and a photocopy of a permission letter from Alice B. Toklas.
Also in this series are the Epistolary Tribute letters, written by Sypher's former students and Simmons' colleagues upon his retirement in 1973, which document Sypher's influence in their lives and provide details on how he conducted his classes. The condolence letters to Lucy Sypher, 1987-1988, provide further insight into Sypher's role as a teacher. There is also correspondence with a former graduate student who lived and taught in Israel and wrote about Israel's military and political struggles from 1972 to 1980. There are two unexplained gaps in the professional correspondence from July 1949 to April 1951 and from June 1951 to March 1953.
The Programs series documents Sypher's attendance at various conferences. The Course and Teaching Materials series provides a detailed look at the information Sypher compiled for several of the courses he taught, and the Speeches and Addresses series contains primarily Sypher's academic speeches and addresses. The Unpublished Lectures series contains the lectures Sypher prepared for numerous scholarly institutions and organizations.
The Research Notes and Reading Cards series contains notebooks and cards that appear to have been compiled when Sypher was conducting research abroad and detail the type of information Sypher gathered on his subjects; other materials also document the type of research Sypher conducted in preparing to write. The Articles and Essays series and the Book Reviews series contain typewritten copies of various of Sypher's articles, essays, and book reviews and document the scope of Sypher's interests.
The Manuscripts series contains primarily working copies, corrected copies, and final copies of many of Sypher's works: Enlightened England; Four Stages of Renaissance Style; Art History; The Ethic of Time; Literature and Technology; Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art; The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning (introduction by Sypher); and Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature. Missing from this series are copies of Comedy and Guinea's Captive Kings.
Of the remaining groups of materials, the Manuscript Photographs series contains photographs obtained by Sypher for publication in various of his works; the Reviews of Sypher Works series contains items which mention Sypher and reviews of several of his works; and the Materials from Publications series contains materials removed from publications in Sypher's personal library. The Published Articles and Essays series and the Published Book Reviews series contain published copies of articles, essays, and book reviews written by Sypher; these series may not encompass the total of Sypher's published writings. The final series, Publications from Sypher's Library, contains books from Sypher's personal library.
Researchers should also be aware that other materials relating to Sypher may be found in a file maintained originally by the Office of Public Information in the Archives vertical files and the records of the Department of English: in particular, a sound recording of one of Sypher's classroom lectures (Accession No. 88.035). In addition, photographs of Sypher may be found in the Archives' photograph collections.
These and related materials may be found under the following headings in online catalogs.
Collection is arranged into 16 series:
Box 1
Box 2
Box 3
Box 2
Box 4
Box 5
Box 6
Box 7
Box 8
