Owen, Peter, 1927-2016.
The records are arranged in three series: I. Letters (Outgoing Correspondence), 1954-1970;
II. Recipients (Incoming Correspondence), 1948-1976; and III. Miscellaneous (Works and
Correspondence by others), 1945-1973. This finding aid replicates and replaces information
previously available only in a card catalog. Please see the
The Peter Owen firm largely published literary works; works in translation (especially of Japanese, South American, Scandinavian, and Eastern European writers); biographies and autobiographies; and other non-fiction works. Owen was the chief editor, but employed several notable editors such as Elizabeth Berridge, Dan Franklin, Michael Levien, Beatrice Musgrave, and Muriel Spark who are represented in these records.
Some of the additional authors represented in the records but not already mentioned include James Agee, Miguel Angel Asturias, William Butler, Blaise Cendrars, Ithell Colquhoun, Jessie Crosland, Margaret Crosland, Anita Desai, Alexandre Dumas, Jean Giono, William Goyen, Lillian Halegua, Rayner Heppenstall, Anna Kavan, Vernon Lee, József Lengyel, George Brown Mair, Margaret Morris, Sōseki Natsume, Norman Newton, Cesare Pavese, Marquis de Sade, Cora Sandel, George Bernard Shaw, Wallace Thompson, Lady Clara Coltman Rogers Vyvyan, and Monique Wittig. A few manuscripts by Peter Owen are also present.
The works include translations into English from Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Flemish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Moghrebi, Norwegian, Punjabi, Romanian, and Swedish.
Translators whose work is represented include Claribel Alegria, Marguerite Alexieva, Miriam Arad, Paul Britten Austin, M. Barnes, Wade Baskin, A. Craig Bell, Paul Bowles, Geoffrey Bownas, Herman Briffault, Alan Brown, Renaud Bruce, Margaret Crosland, Ilona Duczynska, Geoffrey Dutton, Darwin J. Flakoll, Norman Glass, Richard A. Hillard, Mark Hollebone, Paula Hostrup-Jessen, David Le Vay, Tai-yi Lin, Edwin McClellan, Robin Magowan, Francis Mathy, Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin, A. E. (Alma Elizabeth) Murch, R. B. Powell, R. W. Plummer, Gregory Rabassa, E. H. Ramsden, Elizabeth Rokkan, Nina Rootes, T. Støverud, W. J. Strachan, Grace Thornton, Charles Frederick Usborne, V. H. Viglielmo, and William Weaver.
The records also include non-fiction works on Samuel Beckett, Emily Brontë, Marc Chagall, Colette, Jean Genet, Hermann Hesse, Somerset Maugham, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, Peter Ustinov, Richard Wagner, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Woolf. Books on varied topics such as abortion law, contraception, euthanasia, sexuality, and the Vietnam War are also present.
Authors of interest for LGBTQ Studies represented in the records include Burt Blechman, Jane and Paul Bowles, Jean Cocteau, Colette, William Goyen, and Monique Wittig. Science fiction writers include William Butler and William Dexter.
Each of the Additions contains correspondence, works by authors, and production files documenting the process of preparing and publishing books. The final accession from 2010 also includes electronic files created between 1997 and 2006, which were transferred to the Electronic Records Collection.
Because individual books often required several years’ work to publish and to retire the files to the archive, materials for many individual books appear in multiple segments of the records. Peter Owen died in 2016 and was survived by two daughters (Antonia, who became publisher upon his death, and Georgina), and one son (Benedict). The Peter Owen firm was acquired by Pushkin Press in 2022.
Additional works by many of the same authors represented in the card catalog segment are present in the Additions segment, among them Paul Bowles, Colette, Yukio Mishima, Anaïs Nin, and Tarjei Vesaas, as well as William Butler, Ithell Colquhoun, Jessie Crosland, Margaret Crosland, Rhys Davies, Jean Giono, Lillian Halegua, Rayner Heppenstall, Anna Kavan, József Lengyel, Norman Newton, Cesare Pavese, Marquis de Sade, Cora Sandel, Wallace Thompson, and Monique Wittig, along with additional works by both Peter Owen and his wife, Wendy Owen.
Other authors whose works are represented in the Additions are Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, Shūsaku Endo, André Gide, Sue Grafton, Guy de Maupassant, Mervyn Peake, James Purdy, Ken Russell, Natsume Soseki, Gertrude Stein, Rabindranath Tagore, Elisabeth Russell Taylor, Edith Wharton, and Emile Zola. Authors represented by three or more books include Tom Ambrose, William Butler, Colette, Margaret Crosland, Yuri Druzhnikov, H. B. Gibson, Peter Haining, Barbara Harding, Ruth Inglis, Anna Kavan, Michael Simmons, Tim Mitchell, Wendy Owen, Wendy Perriam, Jeremy Reed, Anne Tibble, Peter Vansittart, and Iwo and Pamela Zaluski.
Works in the Additions include translations into English from Bengali, Bulgarian, Danish, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Moghrebi, Norwegian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu.
Translators represented in the Additions include Marguerite Alexieva, Miriam Arad, Wade Baskin, Anne Born, Aurobindo Bose, Paul Bowles, Geoffrey Bownas, Alan Brown, Peter Bush, Haakon Chevalier, Margaret Crosland, Damian Flanagan, Michael Gallagher, Tom Gill, Michael Glencross, Anne Green, George Gretton, Geoff Hargreaves, Khalid Hasan, Joan Henry, Abdullah Hussein, Marlo Johnston, Yoo-Jung Kong, David Le Vay, Ruth Levitt, Herbert Lomas, Cengiz Lugal, John Mason, Francis Mathy, Walter B. Michaels, Thomas Moore, Anna Novotny, Veronica Ralston, Esin B. Rey, Michael Richardson, Elizabeth Rokkan, Nina Rootes, R. H. F. Scott, R. L. Scott-Buccleuch, Louise Sinclair, Lillian Srivastavam, Radhika Prasad Srivastava, Joan Tate, Grace Thornton, Charles Frederick Usborne, June P. Wilson, and Susan Wilson.
The Additions include non-fiction works on Jane Austen, Paul Bowles, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Lord Alfred Douglas, Philip Larkin, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, Mervyn Peake, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf among others. Other books represent a wide variety of subjects, such as abortion, birth control, drugs, fashion, food and drink, economics, education, film, history, marriage and divorce, medicine, music, politics, religion, sexuality, and theatre.
Authors of interest for LGBTQ Studies represented in the Additions include Paul Bowles, Colette, David Herbert, Gertrude Stein, and Monique Wittig. Science fiction writers include William Butler.
The inventory for the Peter Owen Records is a conflation of one inventory (for the card catalog segment), two preliminary inventories (for Additions 4 and 5), plus new inventories for five accessions (Additions 1-3 and 6-7). The Additions have been appended to the end of the original finding aid. Each Addition begins with Box 1, but letters (“a” through “g”) have been added to differentiate the Box numbers for each of the Additions:
The inventories were combined in 2025 to comply with a new content management system.
Peter Owen Records (card catalog segment): Purchases and gifts, 1968-1978 (R4197, R5008, Gift 1972, R5914, R8238). Additions to the Peter Owen Records: Purchases and gifts, 1977-2010 (R7607, G2440, G2446, R14673, R15019, R15423, 2010-03-013-P).
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Peter Owen (Firm) Records (Manuscript Collection MS-03239). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Suzanne Casey, 2001 (preliminary inventory for Purchase, 2001, R14673); Kristen Tucker, 2002 (preliminary inventory for Purchase, 2002, R15019); Joan Sibley and Richard Workman, 2023 (inventory for card catalog segment); Brenna Edwards, 2023-2024 (processed, arranged, and described electronic files from 2010 accession); Joan Sibley, 2025 (combined inventory for card catalog segment, two preliminary inventories, description of electronic files, and inventories of five additional accessions).
University of Delaware.
University of Reading.
The Ransom Center Art Collection contains 41 items for the Peter Owen firm, including illustrations, book jacket designs, and cover illustrations that are unattributed. The electronic files received with the 2010 accession (Addition 7) were transferred to the Electronic Records Collection, but are described in this finding aid.
Note: The original alphabetical arrangement by author of the following files has been
retained. To aid in searching, the original author name forms are now followed by a
slash ( / ) to add any current name authority form. These are especially useful when the
current name form has radically changed, such as:
Note: Publication dates given below for works (in parentheses) are approximate.