Archive of original letters and telegrams to publisher and progressive activist Florence Welch

N.p.: N.p., 1942. Archive of 38 letters and nine telegrams to publisher and progressive activist Florence Welch (then Florence Wagner), sent in response to the sudden death of Florence's husband, publisher and artist Rob L. Wagner, in 1942. Almost all letters and many telegrams with Welch's annotations in manuscript pencil, identifying senders.

Additionally included in the archive are two photographs, one showing Rob Wagner with an unknown man, and the other showing Wagner's son Thom.

Welch worked as a newspaper journalist and activist for women's suffrage in Topeka, Kansas, later moving to California and marrying Wagner, then a prominent artist and magazine writer. In 1929 the pair founded "Script," a left-leaning, weekly literary film magazine. Lifelong Socialists and advocates for progressive causes, the Wagners' "Script" gave a voice to blacklisted screenwriters (including Dalton Trumbo and Gordon Kahn) and prominent leftists, including Upton Sinclair, Max Eastman, and William C. deMille. After Wagner's death Welch would remarry early aviator James L. Breese, living with him in New Mexico and California until her death in 1959.

Archive includes telegrams from Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover, writer Upton Sinclair, director Ernst Lubitsch, producer David O. Selznick, actors Warren Williams and Charles Coburn, actress Dolores Costello, theatre mogul Sid Grauman, and manuscript letters from actor Edward Everett Horton, journalist George Cecil Cowing, writer Ernie Rydberg, actress Marjorie Noble, Federation of Jewish Welfare Organization president Jay B. Jacobs, journalist and editor Grace Kingsley, and African American actress Mary Alice Smith.

Materials Near Fine to Very Good plus, with light creasing and edgewear.