Lily Bess Campbell (1883-1967) was a professor of English at UCLA (1922-50), won the achievement award from the American Association of University Women in 1960, and was named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1962. The collection consists of research notes, personal and professional correspondence and documents, and two photographs.

Lily Bess Campbell was born on June 20, 1883 in Ada, Ohio. She received her B. Litt. in 1905 and her MA in 1906 from the University of Texas. After a long period of ill health, she began her professional career as Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin (1911-1918) and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1921. Though her first published work treated Victorian poetry (The Grotesque in the Poetry of Robert Browning, Austin, Texas: University of Texas, 1907), her major contributions to the academic field were made as scholar of Renaissance drama and an eminent Shakespearean authority. Campbell taught at UCLA from 1922 until she retired in 1950 (among the many students she influenced was dancer-choreographer Agnes De Mille). In 1923, she published Scenes and Machines on the English Stage during the Renaissance, a Classical Revival, a work based on her 1921 dissertation. Her next important book was Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, Slaves of Passion (Cambridge U.P., 1930). She went on to produce the first modern edition of The Mirror for Magistrates based on originals in the Huntington Library in 1938. In his "Dedicatory Preface" to Essays Critical And Historical Dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (1950), Folger Shakespeare Library scholar Louis B. Wright wrote, "Miss Campbell's edition of the Mirror and its later augmentations perhaps will stand as her most enduring contribution to the advancement of Renaissance learning" (vii). Campbell later published Shakespeare's "Histories"; Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (The Huntington Library Press, 1947). In addition to her scholarly work, she published a satirical novel in 1929 entitled These Are My Jewels. A complete bibliography of her work can be found in Essays Critical And Historical Dedicated to Lily B. Campbell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950, on pages 285-286.

12 boxes (6 linear ft.)

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