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Collection Data
- Description
- Angela Morgan (ca. 1875-1957) was an American author, poet and journalist. Papers include correspondence, literary manuscripts and notes, articles and lectures, notebooks, photographs and sound recordings which document Angela Morgan's life and career as journalist, author, poet, lecturer and recitalist from 1904 until her death in 1957. About one-half of the collection consists of manuscripts of published and unpublished poems, short stories, novels, articles, lectures and autobiographical writings. The correspondence is mainly with fellow poets, friends, benefactors, admirers, and family members. Some of the correspondence relates to her mystical experiences. The literary notes record the development of her ideas and philosophical reflections throughout most of her writing career. Included are notes on romantic love and on the psychology of the creative worker. There are also sound recordings of Morgan reading her poetry and of performances of songs for which she wrote the lyrics.
- Names
- Morgan, Angela, 1874-1957 (Creator)
- Atwood, Robert (Correspondent)
- Brown, Abby Sutherland (Correspondent)
- Cheyney, Ralph, 1896-1941 (Correspondent)
- Garns, John Seaman (Correspondent)
- Hammond, Emily V (Correspondent)
- Hoffman, Alice (Correspondent)
- Hoffman, Joseph (Correspondent)
- Holmes, John Haynes, 1879-1964 (Correspondent)
- Learned, Arthur Garfield (Correspondent)
- Robinson, Formosa (Correspondent)
- Rudge, William Edwin, 1876-1931 (Correspondent)
- Stille, Samuel Harden (Correspondent)
- Trent, Lucia, 1897-1977 (Correspondent)
- Morgan, Angela, 1874-1957 (Author)
- Morgan, Angela, 1874-1957 (Addressee)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 1901 - 1957
- Library locations
- Manuscripts and Archives Division
- Shelf locator: MssCol 2057
- Topics
- Authors
- Journalists
- Poets
- Autobiography -- Women authors
- Lectures and lecturing -- United States
- Poetry, Modern -- 20th century
- Private revelations
- Short stories, American
- Morgan, Angela, 1874-1957
- Genres
- Photographs
- Prints
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: According to her official biography, Angela Morgan, author, poet and journalist, was born in Washington, D. C., the daughter of Alwyn Morgan and Carol Baldwin Morgan. However, according to a biographical sketch prepared by the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, which has custody of Angela Morgan's earlier papers, she was most likely born circa. 1875 or thereabouts during the time when her family was residing in Yazoo County, Mississippi. Her given name at birth was "Nina Lillian" which she later changed to Angela. According to the Bentley sketch her father was Albert Talmon Morgan, a Quaker, who had left Oberlin College in 1861 to join the Union Army where he rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel. After the war he settled as a "carpetbagger" on a plantation in Mississippi where he met and married Carolyn Victoria Highgate (1860-1926), the daughter of a mulatto father and a white mother, and who was a teacher in the Freedmen's Bureau. His experiences in Mississippi during Reconstruction are described in his book Yazoo, Or On the Pickett Line of Freedom in the South (1884).
However, details of the early life of the Morgan family, which included three other sisters besides Angela and a brother Albert, are somewhat scanty. From 1876 until 1885 the family resided in Washington, D. C. where the father held a minor patronage job in the pension service. The Morgans then moved to Lawrence, Kansas where Col. Morgan engaged in business and in the practice of law. But he proved unsuccessful at both. Although "brilliant" he was also, according to Angela, a "dreamer and an idealist" who was always defending the poor and the helpless at the expense of his own interests and who was simply unable to adjust to the commercialism of the age. In 1890 he left his family in Topeka to prospect for gold and silver in Colorado, returning to visit his family only occasionally. He died in Denver on April 15, 1922.
After the departure of their father the Morgan sisters formed a quartet, and managed by their brother Albert who also sang baritone, earned their livelihood on the stage by giving musical performances as "The Morgan Sisters" and "The Angela Sisters". The group apparently performed until 1898 when the death of one of the sisters (Helen) and the marriage of the others ended the collaboration. Angela herself was married in 1900 to Peter Sweningson but the marriage lasted only briefly and was legally dissolved in 1906.
Angela Morgan claimed that she could not remember a time when she was not scribbling stories or verses. Obliged to support herself, her mother, and occasionally her two sisters, she employed her literary talents in the decade before W. W. I. as a reporter and feature writer in Chicago for the Chicago Daily American, and later in New York and Boston for the New York American and the Boston American. Under her own by-line she produced a plethora of human interest stories (some of which were slanted towards a feminine readership), published accounts of interviews with local notables and celebrities, covered criminal trials (including the trial of Bessie Wakefield who was condemned to death for the murder of her husband), and described the ordinary human tragedies coming before family and divorce courts. While covering a strike (c1909?) of garment workers in Boston she interviewed the celebrated labor organizer and reformer Gertrude Barnum (1866-1948). She maintained that it was her experiences as a newspaper reporter which brought her into daily contact with the helpless and downtrodden that provided the background and motivation for her major "sociological" poems.
A major break in her career which permitted her to escape from the drudgery of newspaper work and to devote herself entirely to creative writing occurred in 1915 when a prominent preacher (G. Campbell Morgan) whom she had been assigned to interview, read her poem "God's Man" from his pulpit in New York. This led to its publication in Collier's Weekly, and to the launching of her career as a free lance poet and author. About the same time her work came to the attention of Mrs. John Henry Hammond, a wealthy New York patroness, under whose urging her first book of poems, The Hour Has Struck (1914), was published. Mrs. Hammond was also responsible for bringing her poem "The Battle Cry of the Mothers" to the attention of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie who had it printed and distributed in booklet form. She had recited the poem in her capacity as delegate at the International Congress of Women held at the Hague, Holland in 1915.
She was for a time (ca. 1918-1920?) under contract with the International Features Syndicate to supply poems for weekly publication, but this arrangement, while it provided her with substantial income ($125 per week), left her spiritually exhausted. In New York she lived with her mother in apartments at various locations on the Upper West Side, including Riverside Drive (where she occupied a seven room apartment for five years), Cathedral Court, West 113th Street, and Claremont Avenue.
In the summer of 1923 Angela and her mother (who was not only her constant companion, but as she avowed, her spiritual guide and inspirer, left New York for London where they were to remain for almost three years. (Her mother died there in September of 1926 as they were preparing for the return voyage). While in England Angela, although cut off from her American literary markets, managed to derive some income from the sale of poems for special occasions (usually through the intervention of her benefactor, Mrs. Hammond). She also interviewed prominent British personalities including Mrs. Lionel Guest, Beatrice Ward and the labor leader John Burns in preparation for articles she was writing about the role of women during the general strike which paralyzed the country during her stay. Already well known for her brilliant poetry readings, she was invited by the Poetry Society of London to read some of her poems from the pulpit of Chapel Royal, Savoy, the first woman ever to have been granted that honor.
On her return to America in the fall of 1926 she settled in Philadelphia. For several years she was resident poet at Ogontz Junior College, Rydal (Penna.). She also served as president of the Philadelphia branch of the League of American Penwomen and chairman of the literary arts committee of the Philadelphia Art Alliance. In 1936 she was elected poet laureate of the National Federation of Women's Clubs.
Plagued by financial difficulties (she was forced by her creditors to declare bankruptcy in 1935) and often dependent upon the generosity of benefactors to make ends meet, she was continually moving from place to place in response to invitations from friends and changing circumstances and opportunities. In the late 1930s she spent several years in California and travelling throughout the West and Mid-West giving poetry readings, lectures and recitals. During the last decade or so of her life she resided mainly at Brattleboro, Vermont (in order to be near her sister Carolyn who was confined to a sanitarium there), at Saugerties and at Mt. Marion, New York where she died.
During her most productive years (from 1914 to 1940) her poems, articles and short stories appeared in most of the major magazines of the time including Ainslee's, The Cosmopolitan, The Delineator, Everybody's Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Hearst's Magazine, The Ladies Home Journal, The London Poetry Review, The Outlook, Redbook, and many others. During the same period she published some fourteen books of poems, one novel and a book of short stories including The Imprisoned Splendor (1915), Utterance and other Poems (1916), Forward March! (1918), Hail Man (1919), Silver Clothes (1926) Selected Poems (1927), Creator Man (1929), Awful Rainbow (1932), and Gold on Your Pillow (1936). In the last decade of her life she continued to publish by private press and by subscription a few volumes of poems including Behold the Angel (1945), Whirlwind Vision (1943) and Let Loose the Splendor (1951). Other works including a compilation of her verses ("Rockets to the Sun" were in preparation at the time of her death. Her principal publishers were John Lane Co. and its successor, Dodd, Mead Co. Many of her works, however, were printed by obscure and private presses.
An eclectic in religious matters, she avoided religious affiliations although she claimed to be in complete accord with the tenets of Bahaism. She was strongly influenced by the American transcendentalist movement and, through her mother, by Swedenborg, and later, through her own readings, by Plotinus. From the latter she derived the conviction that art, instead of merely imitating nature, created it, by giving physical embodiment to its ideal forms. She came to regard poetry as a vehicle for the expression of cosmic truths and ultimately for the spiritual transformation of mankind. The messianic element in her thought was strengthened in her later years by a series of mystical experiences in which (as she described them) showers of light radiating from the heavens became focused on her hands and body and materialized into golden particles. She finally became convinced that she was in direct contact with the cosmic forces which created the universe. Her mysticism, however, was more of a means than an end. She was a social visionary who opposed war, capital punishment, the economic exploitation of the poor, and the oppression of women, and who pleaded, in her most serious poems, for a world of peace, social justice and human brotherhood.
Although widely published in popular magazines and the author of many volumes of poems and the writings, Angela Morgan was not regarded by her peers as a poet of the front rank. She remained aloof from the main current of the modern poetry movement sympathizing with the Imagists but never venturing herself into free verse or exploring new forms of poetic expression. She remained firmly within the classical tradition of the heroic couplet and the sonnet in the manner of Pope and Coleridge. Her power and singularity lay in the extraordinary compassion and emotional intensity of her major poems.
In recognition of her literary accomplishments Angela Morgan was awarded in 1942 an honorary degree (Litt. D.) by the Golden State University, Los Angeles. She died on January 24, 1957 at Mt. Marion, New York at the home of her friends Mr. and Mrs. Warren Meyer with whom she had spent the last years of her life.
- Content: The papers of Angela Morgan consist of correspondence, literary manuscripts and notes, articles and lectures, notebooks, personal miscellaneous papers, photographs, sound recordings, clippings and other printed matter. The papers document her life and career as a journalist, author, poet, lecturer and recitalist from ca. 1904 until her death in 1957. Almost one-half of the collection consists of literary manuscripts and typescripts of her published and unpublished poems, short stories, novels, articles, lectures, and autobiographical writings. Many of the manuscripts are present in multiple and/or inchoate drafts which reveal the progression of her creative thoughts. Her literary notes also reveal the development of her ideas and philosophical reflections throughout most of her writing career. Included are extensive notes on love and on the psychology of the creative worker. Some of the papers reflect her sojourns abroad in Europe (1915) and in England (1923-26). Most of her correspondence (about 15% of the papers) is with fellow poets, friends, benefactors and admirers, and family members. There are no papers documenting her life prior to 1904 other than what is contained in her autobiographical writings.
- Ownership: 12/14/1962 Kamarck, Frank and Esther 714 Chestnut Ave.,Teaneck, N.J. Gift
- Ownership: MSS 62M102
- Acquisition: Donated by Frank and Esther Kamarck, 1962-1963. Additional materials donated by Barbara Morris, 2007.
- Content: Processing information: John D. Stinson, October 1991, Revised by Susan Malsbury, May 2007
- Content: Related material: also located at Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
- Biographical/historical: Lucia Cheyney, (nom de plume: Lucia Trent)
- Physical Description
- Photographic prints
- Audio disc
- Extent: 31.3 linear feet (84 boxes)
- Type of Resource
- Text
- Still image
- Sound recording
- Identifiers
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b11903985
- MSS Unit ID: 2057
- RLIN/OCLC: NYPW91-A133
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): 75f55950-7263-013b-3624-0242ac110003
