Sinclair Kennedy papers

The papers of Sinclair Kennedy span the years from 1905 through 1946, with the bulk of the material being from the years of World War II, 1941-1945, and a smaller grouping from the 1930s. The largest part of the materials is the correspondence, which falls into two main groups:

a) Personal or institutional correspondence – Letters to and from family members or friends. Correspondence with both these groups tends to be political in nature, often having to do with international politics and Kennedy's belief that the English-speaking nations should band together. The friends include citizens of other English-speaking countries: Newfoundland (which was separate from Canada until 1949), New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain.

b) Subject correspondence files – Letters to and from government or media bodies, mostly impersonal. There are two sets of topics: wartime issues, which include wartime conservation, nutrition for servicemen, etc.; and correspondence regarding Kennedy's writings The Pan-Angles and Why Federate?

Nearly every correspondence file has a clippings file associated with it. Kennedy seems to have subscribed to a clippings service, which would collect and date stamp newspaper articles about the topics that interested him.

Kennedy's writings include mostly typewritten entries to the Circular Quarterly, apparently a newsletter his college friends put together to keep up with each other's lives. They are dated approximately every three months from 1917 through 1945, though tapering off in the later years. They describe Kennedy's daily life and travels much more fully than his correspondence does.

Other writings include drafts of a play titled "As We Will," a vision of a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in 1938, and several open letters about English-speaking federation or wartime issues which he wrote during the First World War.