Letters and other papers documenting the successful writing careers of Clements ("Clem") Ripley (1892-1954) and Katharine ("Kattie") Ball Ripley (1898-1955), independently and collaboratively, in North and South Carolina and California. Later papers document the World War II military service of their son, , who served in Italy. Consisting of correspondence with literary agents in New York and California, certificates of copyright registration, publishers' agreements, assignments of rights, clippings scrapbooks and files of notices and reviews, the collection contains published and unpublished copies of their stories, novelettes and miscellaneous other short pieces, as well as typescripts of screenplays and novel-length synopses. Early papers of 1920s document seven years that the couple attempted to cultivate peaches in the Sandhills on a farm in Moore County (N.C.), . The orchards only made a profit in 1926 so the couple sold the farm following Clements Ripley's successful sales of his writing in 1927. In 1931, Kattie Ripley published an account of life on the farm in the memoir, "a venture Katherine Ripley later published in 1931 in a well-received memoir: "Sand in My Shoes." Letters that discuss this work include an undated letter from her aunt Beatrice [Witte Ravenel] (1870-1956), herself a journalist and poet, while another correspondent, bookman Nick Wreden (in letter, 23 Feb. 1931), thought that special interest-and thus sales-might be generated, especially in Tennessee, by the very comparison of its unromantic rural narrative with the neo-Jeffersonian experience promoted in the collection of essays published as "I'll Take My Stand" the previous year, "The purpose of that book was to fight the industrialization of the South and to romanticize farming.... Now I am certain that if your book can be linked with it as a sort of an antidote it might help the sale." In 1934 a California agent negotiated the sale of one of Clem's Cosmopolitan stories, "A Lady Comes to Town," to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $30,000 - the highest price paid up to that time by a movie studio for a short story. This was the major beginning of the Ripleys' association with Hollywood, which lasted into the late 1940s. The Ripleys frequently traveled between Hollywood from their home in Charleston during the latter half of the 1930s and most of the 1940s. Clem worked as a ten-week contract writer and trouble shooter, sometimes writing a screenplay from his own story-as in "Gold Is Where You Find It" (1937), and sometimes adapting the work of others. For instance, clippings in the collection reveal that, of the three screenwriters associated with it, he received top billing for the screen adaptation of Owen Davis' play "Jezebel" (1938), for which Bette Davis won an Academy Award-a film which, even years later, The New Yorker (25 April 1983) would claim contained "some remarkable passages." Meticulous financial records document the Ripleys' income (chits from Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and RKO Radio Pictures); investments; and the two homes they purchased in Charleston, first at 34 Church Street and later at 18 Lamboll Street. Other papers relate to the Ripleys' travels-to England in 1949 and to the Caribbean in 1952-and include copies of the series of articles which Kattie wrote on the earlier trip for publication in The News and Courier, giving early post-war impressions of Dublin, London, Rome and Paris. World War II letters document the service of their son, William Y. Warren Ripley in Italy. Between Jan. 1944 and Mar. 1946, Ripley wrote his parents almost weekly, where he initially saw front-line action for five months as a field artillery officer with the 34th Division, and later as an administrative officer with the 753rd Railway Shop Battalion. Ripley's War War letters discuss war-time Italy, and his accounts of the battleground and a hospital in which the worsening condition of his eyesight mandated reassignment, to temporary residence in a detested replacement depot and his ultimate billet in the railway shop battalion at Leghorn (Livorno). Letters discuss the progress of the war; "sweating out the invasion"; the often slow, unpredictable, routine nature of military maneuvers and reconnaissance work; the real humor, laconic toughness, inventiveness and resourcefulness of the ordinary soldier in contrast to the false dramatization of him in the typical American war film; and the almost universal mild psychoneurosis produced by line duty; weather conditions, the maintenance and loss of equipment, the receiving and censoring of mail, picking up souvenirs and "trophies," the procurement of food and liquor, the shortage of cigarettes, and being homesick. He shares his attitudes and opinions about money, atrocities, the labor strikes back home, the killing of Mussolini, the role of the Russians in the war and afterwards, the army's rotation and demobilization programs, the idea of the war itself. Letter, 26 Dec. 1944, he singled out for special commendation the front-line bravery and discipline of the Japanese-American soldiers who fought on the Italian front-"I'd especially like to take those very few people back in the United States that call our Japanese-Americans from Hawaii yellow Japs up there. I worked for a couple of weeks with the remaining fellows of the 100th infantry Battalion....I've worked with a number of infantry outfits, but that one is tops by far. They have the best record of any battalion over here probably and besides that are some of the swellest fellows I ever met. The Krauts are scared to death of them and I don't blame them. Those guys are about five feet seven of pure guts." Letters include graphic accounts of his own close calls as an artillery-man in the war zone, his accident in a jeep, his substantial wins at poker, trips to Rome and Florence, and the effect of the announcement of the end of the war: letter, 8 May 1945, reporting that news "that the war had ended.... There hasn't been much celebration over here, but I suppose people in the states went somewhat nuts for awhile. The only celebrating I did was work an extra two hours last night, but some of the men got thoroughly plastered early in the evening. Unfortunately we had some seven or eight engines out in the yard all with a full head of steam, so the noise was pretty bad for an hour or so. They started the air-raid sirens going and that started the boats in the harbor. However, the war doesn't end every day, so I kept out of things and let the men do what they pleased."; faced with the prospect of serving in the Pacific Theatre, Ripley wrote (24 July 1945), "I'll quote a little piece that I read in the Stars and Stripes that Burnet M[aybank] said. 'Many South Carolinians want to stay in the Army since "South Carolina is a fighting state[.]"' My God! I wish he could hear some of the comments of a few of the men around here who have been over here some thirty four odd months." Other correspondents include Thomas R. Waring, editor of The Charleston Evening Post; DuBose Heyward (1885-1940)
