James Stevens was a writer and public relations counsel who was best known as the creator of Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett. He was born in 1892 in Albia, Iowa, and educated at public schools there and in Idaho. He worked in logging camps in his teens and early twenties, but in 1924 he turned to writing as his career. Between 1924 and 1937 he freelanced. In 1937 he was hired by the West Coast Lumbermen's Association (WCLA) as public relations director, a job that allowed him to combine his writing talents with his interest in and knowledge of the forest products industry. He stayed with WCLA until he retired in 1957.
His interest in forests also led him to become one of the founders of the Keep Washington Green Association, which was begun in 1939-1940, growing out of the Junior Forest Council. He served with the association until 1957 as a Secretary-Treasurer and a member of the Board of Trustees. He was also a Trustee of the Washington State Forestry Conference, a member of the Society of American Foresters, and of the American Forestry Association.
Besides his position with WCLA, he was very active in the activities of the Congregational Church in King County as well as in the Washington-Northern Idaho Council of Churches, and served as Public Relations Chairman for them. The job included writing a column for the publication,
Stevens was also active in professional writers' associations and served as Trustee of the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. He wrote copy for the Historical Markers Committee of the Washington State Historical Society in 1957. During the planning for the World's Fair in 1961-62, he served as a member of the Cultural Arts Committee.
Arranged in 2 accessions:
Includes correspondence, ephemera, newspapers, writings, list of works, and a sound recording.
Open to all users.
Creator's literary rights not transferred to the University of Washington Libraries.
The bulk of the papers is personal, comprising correspondence, speeches and writings, clippings, photographs, and related materials. However, because of the original arrangement of the papers and because Stevens's interests were so interrelated, the personal papers contain much material that relates to and derives from his positions.
Most correspondence is personal; but correspondence includes that written as Public Relations Director for the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, for the Council of Churches, for Keep Washington Green, and so on. To separate it would have been difficult as Stevens often did not use an official title on his letters, and he had not made any filing distinction between his official and private correspondence.
The Records from Organizational Affiliations and Memberships also contain some correspondence related to what may be found in the personal papers. These files came from folders which Stevens had kept separate from the rest of the papers, and no attempt was made to interfile them with the bulk. For the most part they are complete entities concerning single organizations.
Much incoming correspondence was recopied by Stevens for circulation among WCLA members and the like. These copies have been treated like originals and filed in the Incoming Correspondence series. The Outgoing Correspondence series in the 1920s has a large number of letters addressed to "Fitzgerald." This man was with the West Coast Lumber Trade Extension Bureau for which Stevens did some work.
The Speeches and Writings series is the largest in the collection, consisting of stories and articles, columns, reviews, poems, songs, speeches, and so on. Subseries have been established for each type. Again, the stories and articles include releases and articles written for all the organizations for which he worked. The decision not to separate them was due again to his original arrangement which made no distinction and to the desire to have a single alphabetical sequence. Therefore, all prose--articles, short stories, drafts of book-length works, releases--is filed under the subseries, Articles and Stories. Some items had not been given titles; if they concerned an individual, the name of that person was assigned as the title.
James Stevens is known as the creator of Paul Bunyan because of his extensive writings on the legendary logger, but little of the original writings appear here. These were previously given to the University of Minnesota Library. There are still extensive writings about Paul Bunyan, though, and all (fiction and nonfiction) are found under "Paul Bunyan" in the Articles and Stories subseries.
The same kind of filing arrangement was used for the Davy Crockett short stories that appeared in
The Ephemera series contains much material from the West Coast Lumbermen's Association (some of it authored by Stevens, but not so identified), and from Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company.
Clippings may be found in several series. Clippings of his column, "Out of the Woods," have been filed with other copies of the column under Speeches and Writings. Reviews of Stevens's writings have been filed in their own series. The clippings that remain are filed in the Clippings series and tend to be personal in nature. The Stevens clippings have been separated from the general clippings. Those with specific subjects were so designated by Stevens.
The periodical publications containing Stevens's writings are listed in chronological sequence with publishing information. The periodicals themselves have been filed alphabetically by title.
Disc - "Cross Section NAM," September 7, 1946. Includes "A Brief Historical Sketch of Grays Harbor," 1942