Murray Wright Bundy was born July 29, 1891 to Lena M. Mallery Bundy and Charles H. Bundy in Binghamton, New York. He received his university education at Cornell, completing his undergraduate work in English and History in 1912. That same year he won the Guildford Prize for an essay entitled "The Sophists." In 1914, one year after obtaining his M.A., Bundy received the Cornell Fellowship in English. Following his acceptance of a position at the University of Illinois in 1919, Bundy, his wife, Mary Rappleye Bundy and their young daughter, Lena, moved to Urbana, so that Bundy could begin his new position while finishing his degree. In 1920, at the age of twenty-nine, Murray Wright Bundy earned his Ph.D. from Cornell. He wrote his dissertation on the Theories of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought.
Bundy taught at three institutions of higher education during his career beginning with the post in the English department at Cornell (1914-1919. He was an instructor and then an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1919-1928. In 1928, he was recommended for the Headship of the Department of English at Washington State College, a position he accepted and held until 1956 when he was retired as Professor Emeritus. Throughout his career, Bundy built a reputation as a scholar and writer. He was well known in his field of literary criticism as an expert on Shakespeare and Milton and as a specialist in the area of epic poetry. Bundy was also a highly regarded instructor and mentor, liked by his students for his thorough and interesting treatment of English Literature. Following his retirement, he continued his involvement with professional groups and fraternities and remained active in the Community Congregational Church. The WSU Department of English has named the Bundy Reading Room in Avery Hall in his honor. Bundy died at Moscow, Idaho, in Feb. 1989.
The Murray W. Bundy Papers contain three series, Correspondence, Essays-Drafts & Manuscripts, and Lecture Notes. Letters dating from 1919 to 1961 comprise the Correspondence series. They are arranged alphabetically within the file by correspondent. Each correspondent's letters are then arranged chronologically. The bulk of the correspondence is concentrated in the periods 1919-1928 (Lane Cooper's letters regarding editing and publication concerns and 1950 (Emma Clarke's letters concerning her father's notes on the 1870 performances of Edwin Booth in Hamlet).
The second series, Drafts, Essays & Manuscripts, contains an assortment of Bundy's early college papers including one thesis and many later working papers and notes. The files are arranged alphabetically by title/subject as they follow the sequence of the series (drafts-essays-manuscripts). Much of Bundy's research on Milton and Shakespeare is evidenced in this series, including his search for epic patterns in Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Items of interest include Bundy's hand-drawn schematic diagrams of Milton's narratives, photostats of Charles Clarke's 1870 diary of Edwin Booth's production and performances of Hamlet, and one of Bundy's published papers on Milton: "Eve's Dream and The Temptation in Paradise Lost." The Ephemera file at the end of the series contains copies of published works on Milton written by Bundy and another scholar, Merritt Hughs.
The third series contains a sampling of Bundy's lecture notes. They are arranged alphabetically by title or subject and include his six hundred and thirty-four page English Literature notes and school term lecture schedule, both from 1924-25.
This collection is open for research use.
[Item Description]. Cage 589, Murray W. Bundy Papers. Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The items in this collection were discovered among inactive files of the English Department at Washington State University in 1987.
The items in this collection were donated to the Libraries in 1987 (MS87-29).
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.
The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection.