The majority of the Fredric March Papers focuses on his professional career, with a lesser quantity of documentation on the career of Florence Eldridge. This material is arranged as series on personal and biographical material, motion pictures, theater, television, radio, and readings and speeches.
The PERSONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL includes four folders of
correspondence, biographical clipping scrapbooks (available only on microfilm), award information, memorabilia, and photographs. The scrapbooks consist of publicity, memorabilia, and reviews, together with material about his World War II USO tour.
The chronologically-arranged correspondence filed with the personal material is fragmentary and incomplete, consisting largely of letters from admirers. The majority of the fan mail concerns One Foot in Heaven and Long Day's Journey into Night. While much of the mail comes from ordinary fans, there are also letters from theatrical colleagues such as Paddy Chayefsky, Charlton Heston, George S. Kaufman, Howard Lindsay, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Sir Lawrence Olivier, and Walter Wanger. There is also correspondence concerning his research on William Jennings Bryan for Inherit the Wind (some with Max Otto) and some contract information for the London run of Long Day's Journey. A few letters touch on problems of USO performances. There are also scattered letters to and from members of his family including a 1912 letter to his mother in which March commented on a performance of Maude Adams in Peter Pan.
Other prominent correspondents from whom there are incidental letters are Leon Ames, John Chapman, Gen. Lucius Clay, Clifton Fadiman, Fred Friendly, Julie Harris, Moss Hart, John Houseman, Helen Keller, Walter Kerr, Stanley Kramer, Max Lerner, Henry R. Luce, Henry Morgenthau, Jawaharlal Nehru, Claude Pepper, Adlai Stevenson, C. L. Sulzberger, Spencer Tracey, Stuart Udall, Mark Van Doren, and Margaret Webster.
Production information, which is chronologically arranged as MOTION PICTURES, THEATER, RADIO, and READINGS AND SPEECHES series, primarily consists of scripts, clippings, and photographs. Except for clippings, the documentation on productions begins in 1932. Even after that date a number of the productions in which March appeared are undocumented or represented with very little material. One file contains playbills for theatre productions in which March appeared for which there is no other types of documentation in the collection. Some of the scripts in the papers are annotated to show character development. Among the best documented are Hombre, The Iceman Cometh, and Gideon. Other notable material in the files includes commemorative volumes for The Buccaneer and Mary of Scotland and the scrapbook put together by the citizens of Racine to honor their native son when Les Miserables opened there in 1935.
March's READINGS AND SPEECHES are represented by scripts and recordings. Some of the scripts are cue cards which show how March phrased and accented his presentations. Many of the readings are of a humanitarian nature.
