Samuel Aaron Tannenbaum was born in Hungary and immigrated to the United States in 1886. In 1898, he began practicing psychotherapy in New York City. He was widely recognized as a scholar of Shakespeare and his times. Chiefly correspondence, 1905-1943, between Tannenbaum and other specialists in 16th- and 17th-century English literature, including Joseph Quincy Adams (1881-1946), Horace Howard Furness (1865-1930), W. W. Greg (1875-1959), William Bailey Kempling, W. J. Lawrence (1862-1940), Arthur Huntington Nason (1877-1944), Ernest Henry Clark Oliphant (1862-1936), Charlotte Endymion Porter (1859-1942), Hyder Edward Rollins (1889-1958), M. H. Spielmann (1858-1948), Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1880-1958), and Charles William Wallace (1865-1932). Letters discuss Tannenbaum's interest in Shakespeare and his works, with particular emphasis on questions of disputed authorship, on Elizabethan theater productions, and on Shakespeare's handwriting and his sexual habits. Also included are letters relating to the Shakespeare Association, the Modern Language Association of America, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Among the small number of letters not relating to English literature are those from individuals in the field of psychology, including a 1908 letter from Sigmund Freud to E. A. Brill about arrangements for Freud's trip to Clark University; two 1913 letters from Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933); one 1912 letter from James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918); and seven letters, 1918-1919, from Ernest Jones (1879-1958) about the establishment of an English language journal on psychoanalysis. There are also a few writings by Tannenbaum on literary and medical topics and a small number of photographs.
