Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America
Archives related to: Longstreet, Stephen
| title | Stephen Longstreet papers, 1925-1990 | repository | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library |
| description | The Stephen Longstreet Collection consists of four types of material: a heavily illustrated typescript of an undated and unpublished book project; 130 drawings in various formats and media; seven collages; and a small group of ephemeral items. The focus of the collection is Longstreet's observation of jazz culture, particularly as it engaged African Americans. He lived in cities on all three American coasts, as well as major cities in Europe, where he recorded scenes and people in local clubs, bars, and music and dance halls. Biographical and Historical Note The artist, novelist, and screenwriter Stephen Longstreet was born in New York City on April 18, 1907, and raised in New Brunswick, NJ. His birth name was Chauncey Weiner, a surname shortened from the family name Weiner-Longstrasse; as a youth he changed his first name to Henry and in the early 1940s became known as Stephen Longstreet. He began his career as a graphic artist in New York by publishing cartoons and vignettes in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Saturday Evening Post, and Colliers, then went on to write radio, television, and film scripts. Longstreet wrote, ghostwrote, compiled, and edited nearly 140 books between 1936 and 1999, which were published under the name Stephen Longstreet, as well as his pseudonyms Thomas Burton, Paul Haggard, David Ormsbee, Henri Weiner, Stephen Weiner-Longstreet, and Philip Wiener. Many of his early drawings appeared with the signature "Henri." Longstreet married Ethel Godoff (1909-1999) in Brooklyn in 1935; they had two children. He died in Los Angeles on February 20, 2002. Longstreet wrote both novels and non-fiction works. Most of the latter were not reviewed kindly, with reviewers questioning his accuracy of content and reliability of sources. Perhaps his most notable hoax was Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam, by herself, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Longstreet (1970). He claimed to have received a manuscript memoir from Kimball (1854-1934), a well-traveled prostitute and New Orleans madam, tried in vain to find a publisher for it in the 1930s, and then held on to her manuscript when she died. After citing it as primary source material for his own books Sportin' House: a History of New Orleans Sinners and the Birth of Jazz (1965) and The Wilder Shore: a Gala Social History of San Francisco's Sinners and Spenders, 1849-1906 (1968), Longstreet sold the manuscript to Macmillan Publishing. Kimball's autobiography received positive notices in newspapers and mass-market periodicals, but academics found too many close parallels in narrative and language to the works of Herbert Asbury (1889-1963), and shortly, both the text and the madam were found to be Longstreet's fabrications. The Wilder Shore itself was then revealed to have been paraphrased from Asbury's book The Barbary Coast (1933). |
| extent | 8.35 Linear Feet (6 boxes) |
| access | The materials are open for research. |
| record link | http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/8010539 |
| record source | http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.longstreet |
| finding aid | Available on the library's website. |
| acquisition information | Gift of Stephen Longstreet, 1965-1992. The portraits of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound were transferred from the Yale University Library's Arts of the Book Collection in 2005. |
| updated | 04/23/2020 18:42:38 |
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