The Sassoon Archive's new home (UK)
On Friday, December 18th, Cambridge University Library took delivery of the personal archive of Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), marking the culmination of a six-month campaign to restore the collection for the nation.
The Sassoon Archive was in the possession of the poet’s son until his death in 2006. It went on the market two years later. Siegfried Sassoon studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and later became an Honorary Fellow of Clare College. The library already held an extensive collection of Sassoon’s manuscripts and letters and thus seemed a particularly suitable home for the Sassoon Archive. It launched a campaign to raise the necessary £1.25 million to purchase the collection. Prior to its purchase, the archive was the most important collection of any First World War poet’s papers still in private hands.
The collection includes the war diaries which Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine from 1915 to 1918, drafts of his autobiographical trilogy The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey, as well as a series of notebooks, which range from records of his schoolboy cricket scores to journals charting the progress of his literary career in the aftermath of the First World War.
Read entire article at History Today
The Sassoon Archive was in the possession of the poet’s son until his death in 2006. It went on the market two years later. Siegfried Sassoon studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and later became an Honorary Fellow of Clare College. The library already held an extensive collection of Sassoon’s manuscripts and letters and thus seemed a particularly suitable home for the Sassoon Archive. It launched a campaign to raise the necessary £1.25 million to purchase the collection. Prior to its purchase, the archive was the most important collection of any First World War poet’s papers still in private hands.
The collection includes the war diaries which Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine from 1915 to 1918, drafts of his autobiographical trilogy The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey, as well as a series of notebooks, which range from records of his schoolboy cricket scores to journals charting the progress of his literary career in the aftermath of the First World War.