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Two notebooks by Mary Huntington Morgan, a noted Gilded Age socialite and diarist, recording a lecture series given by one of the most famous speakers of the age, Professor William Lyons Phelps. Phelps (1865-1943) was an American educator, literary critic, and author. He taught English at Yale from 1892 until 1933, where he championed modern literature through his public lectures, radio show, and newspaper column. He taught America's first university course on the modern novel, a move which brought him worldwide acclaim and earned him the disapproval of his peers. In 1939, Time magazine proclaimed him a "literary showman, playboy of the humanities, Dale Carnegie of the critics", and at the height of his popularity as a public speaker, his audiences numbered nearly 1,000 attendees. Morgan (1873-1966), a socialite and daughter of the US Treasurer Daniel Nash Morgan, was a dedicated lecture-goer and note-taker. She lived in New Haven with her husband Daniel Edwards Brinsmade (a Yale graduate), and writes here under her married name of Brinsmade, filling two memorandum books with her records of Phelps's lectures. She begins on 12 October 1926 and appears to have attended on an almost weekly basis until March 1933, except the months of April through September, when Phelps paused his talks for the summer. She dedicates between one and three pages to each lecture and appears to have treated the lectures as a way of compiling a reading list. Gulliver's Travels is described as "a terrible satire. [by a] most consistent pessimist, a depth of despair beyond our understanding", Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale "made a scandal in England as a leading character seems to have drawn from Thomas Hardy. a terrible book, clever and sharp", and Jane Austen, an author whom Phelps was instrumental in popularizing in the USA, is deemed "a moral genius. Her works more vital to-day than when she wrote them and they will be so 3,000 years from now. She was under 21 when she wrote Pride and Prejudice". Other authors listed and appraised include Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Vita Sackville-West, Edna St Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Richardson, Hugh Walpole, Edna Ferber, and D. H. Lawrence ("negligible"). Besides Phelps's literary commentary, anecdotes are referenced ("Prof Phelps described a visit to Mr and Mrs Henry Ford at Dearborn") and political opinions recorded, including remarks on unemployment in 1929, at the height of the Depression. Non-literary figures featured include D. L. Moody, the American evangelist and publisher, and Clifford Beers, the founder of the American mental hygiene movement. This eyewitness account offers an engrossing reading list of early 20th-century American and world literature, guided by commentary from one of the most popular educationalists of the day. Two flip-top notebooks, duodecimo (155 x 95 & 150 x 92 mm). Vol. 1: original commercial black cloth-backed brown buckram-effect wrappers, front wrapper lettered "memorandum" in black, containing c.150 pp. of manuscript in pencil. Vol. 2: original commercial black cloth-backed green leather-effect wrappers, front wrapper lettered "memo" in gilt, containing c.150 pp. in pencil and blue and black inks. Edges a touch nicked and rubbed, contents a little toned, offsetting from newspaper clippings to first and final pages of vol. 2; a remarkably well-preserved pair.
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