Collections : [University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center]

Alan Campbell , American actor and screenwriter, wrote, with his wife Dorothy Parker, screenplays for Hollywood studios during the 1930s. The collection contains the correspondence and writings of Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker. Included is World War II correspondence, scripts, screenplays, fragments of several short stories, a play, as well as typescripts of pieces by some of Campbell and Parker's contemporaries.

The Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker Collection consists of four series, Correspondence, Financial Papers, Writings and Miscellaneous. The Collection contains correspondence and writings of Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker. Included is correspondence from Campbell to Parker, written during World War II; several letters from Zeppo Marx; and a few letters from Leland Hayward and Rosalie Stewart, with many references to other celebrities. Also included is a portion of the Campbell-Parker collaboration on the screenplay A Star is Born, written with Robert Carson. Campbell’s writings include the script for Told to the Children while Parker is represented by fragments of several short stories and her play The Coast of Illyria. The collection also includes typescripts of pieces written by contemporaries of Campbell and Parker, including Stephen Vincent Benét, Elliott Nugent, John O’Hara, Robert Penn Warren, and Sagittarius (aka Olga Katzin).

Socialist and pacifist active in labor, civil rights, cooperative, and world government movements. The papers comprise scattered meeting minutes of various organizations, notes (some very detailed) on speeches and other social functions attended by Tekla in the Cleveland area in the 1930s, carbon copies of outgoing correspondence, and a collection of mailing lists. There is a considerable amount of print and nearprint material -- single issues of labor periodicals, newspaper clippings, for m letters, flyers, etc. The papers reflect to varying extents Tekla's activities in North Dakota as an organizer for the Civilian Public Service Union, a national organization of conscientious objectors performing alternative service during World War II; his efforts to recruit Cleveland auto workers for the Socialist Party in the late 1930s; and his membership on the national executive committee of the Socialist Party, the executive committee of the War Resisters League, the policy committee of Democracy Unlimited (ca. 1952-56), the Cleveland Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Committee for a Socialist Program and Action (ca. 1959-64). Tekla was heavily involved in the cooperative movement in Cleveland and to a lesser extent in the Saskatchewan Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the mid-1940s.

The collection consists of material created and collected by Tad Tekla, individually and in various roles in socialist and labor organizations.The collection has been arranged alphabetically by topic.The most voluminous material includes: minutes and other records of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, ca. 1945-1958, including records relating to the Committee for a Socialist Program (founded by critics of the Socialist Party who wanted to serve as an "educational and organizational center within the Party"); records and other material relating to labor unions and labor issues, including records of the Civilian Public Service Union, 1946, and records relating to a crisis in the United Auto Workers and efforts by the Socialist Party to recuit auto workers, ca. 1939; "public meeting notes" by Tekla, which include typewritten notes and diaries relating to a wide variety of meetings and events, 1933-1955 (bulk, 1933-1936); material relating to the world citizenship movement, ca. 1945-1958; material relating to the cooperative movement, ca. 1936-1954; records of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), ca. 1948-1952; and outgoing correspondence, 1961-1964.