Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use. There are book contracts that need to be reviewed before access.

Preferred Citation

MSS 16887, Susan Richards Shreve papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Biographical / Historical

Susan Richards Shreve is a prominent writer and English professor of creative writing who founded cultural, literary, and arts foundations and school writing programs. Her work is embedded into myriad aspects of American literary culture,providing deep insights to the American literary scene at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. She was born in 1939, in Toledo, OH., the daughter of Robert Kenneth Richards (1913-1969), a journalist and Government censor during WWII, and Helen Elizabeth Richards. She received her B.A.(magna cum laude), at the University of Pennsylvania, 1961; and her M.A., at the University of Virginia, 1969. She published her first book, A Fortunate Madness (1974), which marked the beginning of a consistently productive and successful publishing career as the author of both children's literature and adult fiction novels.

Shreve has been a significant participant in the Washington D.C. literary community for more than 40 years,combining her role as a writer with several literary occupations, including co-founder of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing at George Mason University (1980), and as co-founder, President, and Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, one of the leading literary foundations in the United States. At PEN/Faulkner she created the Writers in Schools program in 1989, which brings published authors and their books into urban schools.

She has also been a Jenny Moore Fellow at George Washington University, a visiting writer at Princeton University, the School of the Arts of Columbia University,Bennington College Summer Seminars, and Goucher College.

Further, her marriage (1987) to the literary agent Timothy Seldes (1927-2015), brought her even deeper into the American literary community. Seldes owned and led the venerable agency Russell & Volkening for 40 years, where his clients included Annie Dillard, Nadine Gordimer, James Lehrer, Peter Taylor, Barbara Tuchman, Anne Tyler, and Eudora Welty.

Shreve's son, Porter Shreve is also a novelist and a writing professor, and the two have co-published two anthologies, Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America (1997) and How We Want to Live: Narratives (1998).

As a very young child, Susan Shreve contracted polio and had a two year stay at Warm Springs, GA., (1950-1952), a hospital established by Franklin D. Roosevelt for polio rehabilitation. Shreve describes her experience in an autobiographical memoir, Warm Springs: Traces Of A Childhood At FDR's Polio Haven. In an earlier work of fiction, The Lovely Shoes (2011), Shreve writes that when she was 11 years old, her mother contacted the Italian fashion designer and shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo requesting custom made shoes that would allow her daughter to walk and dance and otherwise participate in life in a normal manner. Ferragamo agreed, and produced custom made shoes for Shreve for years.

Her novel, A Country Of Strangers, about a Black and White family living on the same farm was under option for film, and Daughters Of The New World was an NBC mini series under the title A Will Of Their Own. Shreve was often a guest on the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour on PBS.

Honors and awards include:

Jenny McKean Moore Award, George Washington University, 1978;

Notable Book citation, American Library Association (ALA), 1979, for Family Secrets: Five Very Important Stories;

Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, National Council for Social Studies and the Children's Book Council joint committee, 1980, for Family Secrets: Five Very Important Stories;

Best Book for Young Adults citation, ALA, 1980, for The Masquerade;

PEN/Faulkner writers award.

Guggenheim Fellowship grant in fiction, 1980;

National Endowment for the Arts fiction award, 1982;

Grub Street Award in Non-Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe Award, Mystery Writers of America, 1988, for Lucy Forever and Miss Rosetree, Shrinks for Best Juvenile Novel.

Woodrow Wilson fellowships, West Virginia Wesleyan, 1994, and Bates College, 1997;

Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundation grant.

Alumni Award at the Sidwell Friends School

Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers

Sources: Gerald W. Cloud Rare Books • Manuscripts • Archives

Susan Richards Shreve. Wikipedia. Accessed 5/30/25

Content Description

This collection contains the papers of Susan Richard Shreve (b. 1939), a prominent American author, a professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University and a co-founder of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation (1985) for which she served as a board member and chairman.

The collection documents her literary and teaching career with manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, journals, correspondence, contracts, clippings, digital files, and other materials related to her authorship and teaching.

Shreve has published fifteen novels, including a memoir "Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood." She has also published thirty books for children, and edited and co-edited five anthologies spanning from 1974-2019. Her writing is described as having "snap and verve" (New York Times) and marks a significant contribution to the genre. As an author of children's books, Shreve has been described as a "master of subtle and wise perception" (Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books). Her writing in general has consistently taken on a broad range of controversial topics, including political ideology (Children of Power, 1979, which tackles McCarthyism and responses to it), terrorism (Plum and Jaggers, 2000); disability (The Lovely Shoes, 2011) and Warm Springs, 2008); perceptions of racial identity (Glimmer, 1997, as "Annie Waters"); suicide, old age, and divorce (Family Secrets, 1979); and unwed parenthood (Loveletters, 1978, a book which was suppressed by its own publisher amid a controversy between writers, reviewers, and educators, with a subsequent debate in the press that Loveletters should be banned in schools). Her books are page-turners with rich character descriptions often likened to Charles Dickens, and filled with dramatic events.

The bulk of the collection represents her writings, including notebooks with manuscript drafts of many of her works and typescripts, many with annotations, including original versions of novels and stories with alternate titles and unpublished works including I Can Touch an Autumn Morning, Wooden And Wicker, In The Center Ring, The Unadoptables, and Geography Of A Marriage.

Also included are book files which are(organized alphabetically by title) and consist of correspondence, clippings, reviews, promotional material, and ephemera such as dustjackets.

The correspondence includes letters from Shreve's agent, publisher, and editor as well as readers, writers,faculty, other literary agents, journalists, and Washington D.C. residents associated with publishing, writing, and PEN/Faulkner. There are combined personal and professional letters as the author kept these together in her life. There are notable letters from Nicolas Delbanco,Richard Ford, John Irving, Edward P. Jones, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Nan Talese, and Anne Tyler.

Also of interest is correspondence with Edward P. Jones when he was a student at the University of Virginia and having doubts about his writing career while studying for an education. There is also a draft of an article by Shreve in regard to the work of Amiri Bakara who received a PEN/Faulkner award. Shreve often included African American and LBGT perspectives in her writing.

The collection includes the business side of literary work as there are more than sixty contracts as well as printed articles and newspaper clippings. The contracts have limited access due to containing personal information.

There are also address books with entries from dozens of writers, editors, publishers, including Saul Bellow, Donald Bartheleme, John Irving, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, etc. and many others.

The Digital files comprise 911 files. These include a combination of files from her professional writing and teaching career between 2000 and 2020. These files represent a wide range of works, including manuscripts of published and unpublished books and professional writings associated with her novels, her teaching, and her role in the literary community.

Sources: Gerald W. Cloud Rare Books • Manuscripts • Archives

Susan Richards Shreve. Wikipedia. Accessed 5/30/25

Arrangement

The collection is arranged into 10 series. Series 1. Manuscripts and notebooks, Series 2. Typescripts, Series 3. Bookfiles, Series 4. Essays, Articles, and Newspaper clippings, Series 5. Correspondence, Series 6. Contracts (need review for access), Series 7. Teaching, Series 8. PEN/Faulkner and other organizations, Series 9. Personal and miscellaneous, Series 10. Schedule Planners, and notebooks.

Books are organized alphabetically by title. Correspondence is arranged alphabetically for some correspondents B-W and chronologically for general correspondence. This arrangement follows the original order of Susan Richards Shreve's files. Periodicals contain ads and reviews of her books and have been placed in the bookfiles by title of her books.

Related Material

Related collection: University of Virginia Collection of the History of Childhood, parenting, and family building MSS 16758.

Subjects and Indexing Terms

• Authors and publishers
• Children's books
• Families fiction