| Summary |
MS 3020 comprises correspondence, literary manuscripts, notebooks, autobiographical material, newspaper reviews and leaders by Kenneth Slessor, reviews by others of his work, photographs, and war diaries and despatches. The correspondents include Geoffrey Blainey, Harry H. Cox, Beatrice Davis, R.D. FitzGerald, Dame Mary Gilmore, H.M. Green, Jill Hellyer, R. Guy Howarth, Herbert Jaffa, C.J. Koch, Jack Lindsay, Norman Lindsay, Hugh McCrae, Kenneth MacKenzie, Tom Inglis Moore, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, Grace Perry, Hal Porter, Roland Robinson, David Rowbotham, Clement Semmler, Douglas Stewart, Dal Stivens, Kylie Tennant, Francis Webb and Derek A. Whitelock. There are also manuscripts of 28 poems by other poets, including W. Hart-Smith, Jack Lindsay, Phil Lindsay, Kenneth Mackenzie, Hugh McCrae and David Rowbotham. Also, Commonwealth Literary Fund and National Literary Board of Review files documenting Slessor's work as a member (23 boxes, 1 fol. box).
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| Biography/History |
Journalist, editor and author. Kenneth Adolf Slessor was born in Orange, New South Wales, in 1901. He joined the Sun newspaper in 1919 as a cadet journalist. Poems published that year in the Bulletin, Smith's weekly and The triad illustrated Slessor's interest in satire and poetic imagery. His early poems were influenced by the artist, Norman Lindsay. Slessor's first anthology was Thief of the Moon (1924) followed by Earth-Visitors (1926), illustrated by Norman Lindsay. Following brief associations with Vision, a literary quarterly, the Herald and Punch, he returned to the Sydney Sun in 1926. From 1927 to 1940, Slessor was with Smith's weekly when he wrote most of his major poetry and light verse. Regarded as his finest poem, Five bells, an elegiac meditation on the drowning of Joe Lynch in 1927, was published in Five bells: XX poems (1939) with drawings by Lindsay.
A war correspondent from 1940 to 1944, Slessor returned to the Sun and then to the Daily telegraph in 1957, where he remained until his death. One hundred poems (1944), which with additions in 1957 became Poems and selected poems, was the book for which he was best known. He served on the board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund from 1953-1971. Slessor died in Sydney in 1971. His stature as a poet has gradually grown with the release of a number of posthumous anthologies, his war diaries and his writings, as well as critical studies of his poetry.
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