An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
Creator:
Cooper, William, 1910-2002
Title:
William Cooper Collection
Dates:
1932-1991, undated
Extent:
28 boxes (11.55 linear feet), 1 oversize folder (osf)
Abstract:
Contains chiefly manuscripts by the British
novelist Harry Summerfield Hoff, best known by his pseudonym, William Cooper. Included
are
Disquiet and Peace, Memoirs of a New Man, Scenes from Provincial Life, Shall We Ever Know?, and a number of other titles. Also present are
notebooks containing drafts and notes of various stories, speeches and reviews.
Robert Kendrick, 1996; Joan Sibley and Apryl Voskamp, 2015 Note: For collection description previously available only in a card catalog, please see the
explanatory note for information regarding the arrangement of the manuscripts as well as the abbreviations commonly used in descriptions.
William Cooper was a British writer of novels, plays, and non-fiction, who was born
Harry
Summerfield Hoff on August 4, 1910, in Crewe, England. Cooper earned his M. A. degree
from
Christ's College at Cambridge University in 1933. The son of two teachers, Cooper
taught in
Leicester, England from 1933 to 1940. After serving in the Royal Air Force during
World War
II, Cooper held a variety of civil service positions, including assistant commissioner
of
the Civil Service Commission (1945-1958), part-time personnel consultant for the Atomic
Energy Authority (1958-1971) and the Central Electricity Generating Board (1960-1971),
and
assistant director of the Civil Service Selection Board (1971-1975). From 1977 to
1988,
Cooper held the position of adjunct professor at the London Center of Syracuse University.
Cooper married Joyce Barbara Harris in 1951 with whom he had two daughters, Louisa
and
Catherine.
The majority of Cooper's published work has been fiction. Early in his career as H.
S.
Hoff, he published Trina (1934; published in the U. S. as It Happened in PRK), Rhea (1935), Lisa (1937), and Three Marriages (1946). Among the novels published under the
pseudonym William Cooper are The Struggles of Albert Woods
(1953), The Ever-Interesting Topic (1954), Disquiet and Peace (1956), Young People (1958), You're Not Alone (1976), From Early Life (1990), and Immortality at Any Price (1991). Forming the series "Scenes from Life" are the novels Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), Scenes from Married Life (1961), Scenes from Metropolitan Life (1982), and Scenes from Later Life (1983). Interestingly, Scenes from Metropolitan Life, the second novel in the series,
languished unpublished in a bank vault for over thirty years because of threatened
legal
action for libel. Cooper also wrote a play, Prince Genji (1950), the non-fiction Shall We Ever Know? The Trial of the Hosein Brothers for the Murder of Mrs.
McKay (1971), and a pamphlet on his friend C. P. Snow for the series "Writers and Their Work."
Note to Researchers
The inventory for the William Cooper Collection is a conflation of one finding aid
created
in 1996 (for two 1991 additions) and a 2015 finding aid (for 1963-1978 acquisitions)
with descriptions previously accessible only through a card catalog that were
re-cataloged as part of a retrospective conversion project. The 1991 addition was
appended to the end of the 2015 finding aid.
Because both descriptions began the box numbering with Box 1, the 1991 addition is
differentiated by adding the letter "a" to the original box number (e.g., Box 1a,
Box 2a,
etc.). The inventories were combined in 2025 to comply with a new content management
system.
Scope and Contents
1963-1978 Acquisitions
This segment of materials was previously cataloged and available only via a card catalog
and this description replicates and replaces that information.
1991 Acquisitions
The collection consists of holograph and typescript drafts, notebooks, page proofs,
clippings, and a few items of correspondence. The collection is arranged in two series:
I.
Works, 1977-1989 (5.5 boxes, 1 oversize folder); II. Reviews and Articles re Cooper,
1937-1991 (0.5 boxes, 3 bound volumes). Both series are arranged chronologically.
The collection consists primarily of holograph and typescript drafts of works published
1982-1991. Among these are Scenes from Metropolitan Life,
Scenes from Later Life, From Early Life, and Immortality at Any Price. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is represented only by a typescript
printer's copy. Scenes from Later Life includes a holograph draft in
four notebooks, notes, three typescript drafts with copious holograph revisions and
revised
sheets, and a typescript printer's copy. From Early Life includes a
holograph draft in two notebooks and loose sheets, two typescripts with revisions
and
multiple revised sheets, and a typescript printer's copy. For Immortality at Any Price, there are eight notebooks containing a
holograph draft with revisions and three typescript drafts with revisions and multiple
revised sheets, including a final draft. In addition, there are corrected typescripts
for
the biographical essay, "A History," revised page
proofs, and correspondence from Bill Buford concerning the essay's revision for publication
in Granta. There are also revised typescripts of other essays.
Cooper's intense process of revision led him to retype and revise by hand multiple
copies
of single sheets. Each of the early drafts in this collection may have multiple copies
of
various pages. These materials were received without any apparent logical arrangement
of
revised sheets within each title; that is, revisions of a single sheet were not necessarily
filed together. As this is apparently the author's original working order, no attempt
has
been made to collocate multiple revised sheets.
There are also four scrapbooks, containing clippings of book reviews of Cooper's work,
articles on Cooper, and interviews, 1946-1991. The scrapbooks also contain two pieces
of
correspondence and an adaptation of the book Shall We Ever Know? published in the Liverpool Daily Post. In addition, there is a folder of early
clippings (1937, nd) concerning the work of H. S. Hoff, which are mounted on sheets.
1999 Acquisition
Three letters written by Cooper to George Hall, John Hammond, Colin Huggett, 1974-1975,
1982.
