Preferred Citation:	Leonidas Warren Payne Collection (Manuscript Collection MS-03209). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
	Acquisition:	Purchases, 1973-1974 (73-01-002-P, 74-09-004-P).
	Processed by:	Joan Sibley and Paul Sullivan, 2026. 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.

Repository:

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

	Leonidas Warren Payne (known as “Lon” or “Lonnie”) was born in 1873 in Auburn, Alabama, son of a local tinsmith and farmer. Payne earned his BA and MA degrees (1892-93) from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). He taught there and at two state colleges in Alabama before winning a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania for his PhD (1904). He worked briefly at Lippincott as an editor and on the faculty at Louisiana State University before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught from 1906 until 1943. He died in Austin in 1945.
	Payne’s teaching and scholarship made significant contributions to studies of the American language, Texas and Southern folklore, and the incorporation of modern authors in school and college curriculum. With John Lomax he founded the Texas Folklore Society (1909), and he was an early advocate for the work of J. Frank Dobie and Stark Young, among others. He edited several anthologies for school and college use, including American Literary Readings (1917), History of American Literature (1919), Selections from English Literature (1922), and Selections from Later American Writers (1927). In 1928, Payne published A Survey of Texas Literature, said to be the first anthology of Texas literary writers.
	Payne lectured at schools and clubs across Texas and the South. His correspondence, notes, and course materials offer detailed records of literary schooling in Texas in the early twentieth century. Payne brought distinguished writers, including W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, to read to Texas audiences, and the archive includes notable exchanges with Yeats, Frost, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, Harriet Monroe, John Crowe Ransom, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound.

	The collection chiefly contains correspondence of Leonidas Warren Payne, an American linguist and professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin from 1904 to 1943. Correspondents include E. E. Cummings, J. Frank Dobie, Robert Frost, John Lomax (with whom Payne co-founded the Texas Folklore Society), Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, and Stark Young among others.
	This collection was previously accessible only through a card catalog but has now been re-cataloged as part of a retrospective conversion project. The material remains as originally organized into four series: I. Works, 1903-1934; II. Letters (Outgoing Correspondence), 1909-1944; III. Recipients (Incoming Correspondence), 1910-1939; and IV. Miscellaneous, 1893-1957, with materials arranged alphabetically by title or author. See the Indexes for Works, Letters, Recipients, and Miscellaneous in this finding aid to further identify titles of works and correspondent names present in this collection.
	Series I. Works, is a single folder of Payne literary manuscripts, primarily essays and reviews, beginning with a work on Sidney Lanier from 1903, and including an outline for a talk on Frost from 1930 and an account of a poetry reading by Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1934.
	Payne’s correspondence is contained in Series II. Letters and Series III. Recipient. A few dozen letters from Payne to various recipients include several written to leading authors such as Joseph Conrad, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, asking permission to use works in anthologies or articles. Payne also kept copies of letters he wrote to faculty at other colleges, schools, and civic organizations across Texas, often to arrange visiting lectures.
	Five boxes of letters received by Payne in Series III. form the bulk of this collection. Notable are several replies to Payne’s questions about the authors’ works, including letters from E. E. Cummings, J. Frank Dobie, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Harriet Monroe, John Crowe Ransom, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Booth Tarkington, Louis Untermeyer, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, and Stark Young. Poet Wallace Stevens sent two detailed responses to Payne’s comments on several Stevens poems. Ezra Pound wrote to Payne once in the 1920s, proposing a new literary review, and Payne also corresponded with Pound’s father, Homer Loomis Pound.
	Payne also kept letters tracking his employment at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere; his work in professional organizations, including National Council of Teachers of English (founded 1911), The Modern Language Association, and the Texas State Teachers’ Association; his editing and publishing of textbooks and anthologies; his interest in the movement for simplified English spelling; and his lecturing on literature across Texas to clubs and professional groups.
	The Miscellaneous Series comprises two boxes of third-party works and correspondence (i.e., not written by or to Payne), plus some Payne personal and career-related papers. Most materials are filed alphabetically by creator name.
	Among the most significant items here are additional, much later letters written by Ezra Pound to William Christian Smith, 1952-1957. At the time, Smith was a recent University of Texas at Austin graduate, and Pound was in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C.
	Payne’s own personal and career papers in this series include his concise notes on literary works for use in lectures, anthologies, or his own book collection, along with extensive correspondence and receipts from booksellers and publishers, letters from students, and letters of recommendation for Payne.

	In addition to Payne materials located in other Harry Ransom Center collections (J. Frank Dobie, T. S. Eliot, John Erskine, Edgar Lee Masters, Christopher Morley, W. B. Yeats, and Stark Young), see also these two collections at the Briscoe Center at The University of Texas at Austin:
	Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr., Papers, 1913-1916, 1939-1941
	Texas Folklore Society Records, 1909-1970

Additional Payne materials are held in the Harry Ransom Center Library (1,418 books formerly owned by Payne), Photography Collection (12 photographs), and Vertical Files Collection (4 boxes of printed ephemera, such clippings, pamphlets, publication lists and notices, programs, tickets, etc. removed from manuscripts and books during cataloging).

	People
		Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962
		Dobie, J. Frank (James Frank), 1888-1964
		Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
		Frost, Robert, 1874-1963
		Masters, Edgar Lee, 1868-1950
		Monroe, Harriet, 1860-1936
		Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972
		Ransom, John Crowe, 1888-1974
		Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 1869-1935
		Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946
		Untermeyer, Louis, 1885-1977
		Webb, Walter Prescott, 1888-1963
		Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946
		Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939
		Young, Stark, 1881-1963
	Subjects
		Authors
		American literature -- 20th century
		American literature -- Texas
		English literature -- 20th century
		Literature -- Study and teaching -- United States
		University of Texas at Austin
	Document Types
		Correspondence
		Instructional and educational works
		Lecture notes
		Manuscripts