William C. Haygood was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910, and graduated from the Valdosta High School in 1927 and from Emory University at Atlanta in 1931. The following year he received an A.B. degree in Library Science from Emory as a Rosenwald Fellow. In preparation for a Ph.D., Mr. Haygood was enrolled in the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago between 1934 and 1939, and again in 1947 and 1948. During these years he published Who Uses the Public Library: A Survey of the Patrons of the New York Public Library (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1938), and did two pamphlets for the American Library Association on aspects of Inter-American librarianship. He also studied at the Art Institute in Chicago; the universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania; and Central University, Madrid, Spain.
In the 1930s, Mr. Haygood was employed as a librarian in both the Emory University Library and the New York Public Library, and from 1937 to 1938 was field agent for the American Association for Adult Education. At the behest of the Rosenwald Fund, he reorganized the library at Georgia Teachers College, Statesboro, in 1939-1940, and spent the following year in Mexico and Washington as executive director of the American Library Association's Committee on Library Cooperation in Latin America (Rockefeller Grant). He became secretary of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1940, and at the time he went into army service during World War II, was director of fellowships for the Fund.
Following his release from the army in 1945, Mr. Haygood returned to the Rosenwald Fund to administer its fellowship program. During his tenure he handled $100,000 in grants annually for both black and white Southerners, and administered a library program in which one million books were placed in Negro schools in the South.
From 1949 to 1951, he was director of United States Information Libraries in Spain, organizing libraries and training staffs. For the six years following this work, he lived both in Spain and in Madison, Wisconsin, engaging in free lance writing. During this period he published articles in national magazines and professional journals, served as library consultant to the Puerto Rican government (1955), and published The Ides of August: A Novel (1956).
Since 1957, William C. Haygood has been on the staff of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, as editor of the Wisconsin Magazine of History, and in charge of the Society's publications program. In 1957 and 1959 he served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1960 was co-editor of A Soviet View of the American Past.
