This collection documents Dorothy L. Tyler's life and professional career, including her literary endeavors, primarily through her diaries, literary manuscripts, and materials for two unfinished monographs. The collection is of interest to researchers of Detroit history, the Merrill Palmer Institute, literary life at the University of Michigan in the 1920s, Robert Frost, and sculptor Carl Milles. Researchers of women's literary and social history will also find the collection interesting.
The Tyler collection consists of ten boxes of material, two of them diaries and day books. It is divided into the following series:
I. Diaries & Travel Journals
II. Photographs
III. General correspondence
IV. General writings
V. Publications
VI. Miscellaneous clippings, receipts, and reviews
VII. Research for unfinished book on Carl Milles
VIII. Research for writings on Robert Frost
IX. Oversized material
Tyler's diaries and travel journals give a full account of most of her life. She wrote a page or two in her diary almost every day for decades. The diaries record daily activities, as well as her thoughts and ideas about college life, current art and literature, world events, travel, sociological changes in Detroit, and events at the Merrill Palmer Institute. They document her strenuous efforts to remain actively engaged in literary life, even while employed in a demanding professional position. The travel journals document (with text and photographs) a trip to Ireland in 1938, a trip to England in 1960, and a trip to Europe in 1967.
General correspondence included in the collection is incomplete, but includes letters from several major publishing houses to whom Tyler submitted her Hopwood manuscript, Relic of Hilda.
The writings series includes several full-length novels, short stories, novellas, and volumes of poetry. It also includes short poems that she filed interleaved with her diary entries. The sheer volume of poetry and the many rejection slips indicate the extent of her efforts until at least 1971 to place her poems in literary publications of quality.
The collection contains extensive research material for Tyler's projected biography of Swedish sculptor Carl Milles, who was at the Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1931-51. There are some original files from Milles' legal representative and executor, LeRoy W. Dahlberg of Detroit, as well as Tyler's correspondence with a number of Milles friends and associates, notes on each of his sculptures, her draft manuscript, and several shorter articles she wrote about Milles.
Tyler's research and writing on Robert Frost is documented in the last series, which includes correspondence with his friends and associates, a scrapbook of photographs and clippings, and research files and notes.
Dorothy L. Tyler, writer, journalist, and editor, was born July 28, 1901 in Lansing, Michigan. She received an A.B. (English) in 1926 and an A.M. (English), both from the University of Michigan. While at the University, she studied writing with Robert Frost, with whom she later corresponded. She was an active member of student literary circles, working closely with Professor Clarence Thorpe, and was one of "the three muses" dubbed by Frost. Tyler served on the editorial board of the literary magazine, The Inlander and published poems in that journal and in another journal of the time, Whimsies. In the summer of 1925, Tyler and friends Sue Grundy Bonner and Mary E. Cooley published three issues of an independent literary magazine which they called The Outlander. In 1932, she won a Major Hopwood award of $2500 for her novella, Relic of Hilda. In the same contest she was awarded second place in the poetry division.
Tyler worked in various professional capacities at the Merrill Palmer Institute in Detroit, where she accepted her first position in 1927. In April 1943 she moved to Minneapolis, where she was an editor for the University of Minnesota Press, returning to Detroit in May 1948 where she served as Publications Director at the Merrill Palmer Institute and as a writer with the Detroit News.
Throughout her life, Dorothy Tyler wrote prolifically in several genres: short stories, novels, history, and poetry. At her death, she left two unfinished critical manuscripts, one on the work of Robert Frost and one on sculptor Carl Milles. Her poems were published in Scribner's and in other magazines and reviews. Her letters and reviews appeared often in the pages of Detroit newspapers and other periodicals, including The Michigan Quarterly Review. She continued writing until she died in 1982, and was submitting material for publication as late as 1971. In 1972 Tyler left Detroit, spending the last years of her life close to family in Troy, New York.
