Correspondence, lectures, research materials, including photostatic copies of letters, manuscripts, and graphics, along with printed matter, miscellaneous writings, and other papers, with bulk dates of 1936-1948. There is little in the collection that relates to Prof. White's early career. Most of the material appears to have been collected in the course of his work on the English Romantic poets; a small amount of material, comprising reprints and lectures, concerns folklore. Much of the correspondence is between White and other students of the English poets; subjects of the letters include differing opinions and disputes over the interpretation of events in Shelley's life. Other correspondents, among them H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw, congratulate White on his publications. Several folders of correspondence with members of the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf concern the publication of Shelley in 1940. A letter from Duke faculty member Calvin B. Hoover describes Nazi Germany in 1932, and several of White's European correspondents make comments about conditions in Europe during World War II.
Educator, Shelley biographer. Professor of English, Trinity College and Duke University, 1919-1948. Author, Shelley (1940) and Portrait of Shelley (1945), and other works. B.A., M.A. Trinity College, Durham, NC, 1913, 1914. M.A., Ph.D., Harvard, 1915, 1918. Married, 1922, Marie Anne Updike. Died Cambridge, MA, December 6, 1948.
Known in his time as an eminent Shelley scholar, Newman Ivey White was born in Statesville, North Carolina on February 3, 1892. He grew up in Greensboro, where his father, James Houston White, died in 1912. White entered Trinity College in Durham in 1909, graduating magna cum laude in 1913. During his student days, he was a member of the varsity tennis team for three years; he later coached the school's teams. White entered the graduate program at Trinity, obtaining his M.A. in 1914. He then went to Harvard, where he acquired another M.A. (1915) and the Ph.D. (1918). His dissertation was on Percy Shelley's dramatic poems. While at Trinity he had served as an assistant in English and Latin; he later he filled an instructorship at Alabama Polytechnic institute (1915-1916), and taught English at Washington University in St. Louis. He returned to Trinity in 1919 as a member of the English Department. In 1922 he married Marie Anne Updike, a fellow member of the department from 1927 to 1955 who taught modern literature and drama.
Mr. and Mrs. White shared an interest in folksong, and as a scholar, Dr. White authored An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (1924, with W.C. Jackson) and American Negro Folk Songs (1928). In 1943, he became the general editor of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. It was as a Shelley scholar that Dr. White was best known, however. Leaving aside scholarly articles, his first published work on the poet was an anthology, The Best of Shelley (1932). This was followed by The Unextinguished Heart: Shelley and his Contemporary Critics (1938), in which White argued that the poet was not neglected in his own time. Finally, he completed in 1940 his two-volume biography, Shelley, and followed this with a shorter popular biography, the 1945 Portrait of Shelley.
Aside from scholarship, Newman and Marie White were known for their interest in progressive causes. Professor White took an interest in election reform, and in child care facilities for working mothers. He was associated with the West Durham Nursery School (1934-1936), and later the Child Care Association, of which he was chairman and member of the board of directors (1944-1946). He was also a moving force behind the establishment of the Durham Labor and Materials Exchange (1933), a clearinghouse for information about jobs, goods and services available to Durham's unemployed. During World War II, Dr. White served on the Duke University Defense Council, and arranged for publication of articles promoting national unity in the crisis.
White was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Association of University Professors, the American Folklore Society, the Modern Language Association and other scholarly associations, both in the United States and in England. His service to Duke University included membership on the University Research Council and on the Executive Committee of the Friends of Duke University Library.
During the last year of his life, Newman White was engaged in doing research for a biography of William Godwin. He was at Harvard when he died suddenly on December 6, 1948. Mrs. White died in 1975, and is buried in Statesville with her husband.
