Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Miles, Josephine, 1911-
- Abstract:
- The Josephine Miles Papers, 1911-1986, consisting of correspondence and literary manuscripts, as well as a small amount of professional, personal, and family papers, are a thorough representation of the varied interests of this highly regarded poet, scholar, and educator.
- Extent:
- Number of containers: 13 boxes, 9 cartons, 4 volumes, 1 oversize box, 5 oversize folders Linear feet: 18.0
- Language:
- Collection materials are in English.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
The Josephine Miles Papers, 1911-1986, consisting of correspondence and literary manuscripts, as well as a small amount of professional, personal, and family papers, are a thorough representation of the varied interests of this highly regarded poet, scholar, and educator.
The collection contains extensive correspondence, and includes letters from James Dickey, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Wallace Stegner. Her manuscript material, some never published, includes poetry collections, prose, plays, articles, and individual poems, as well as a large collection of poetry notebooks, spanning her adult life. The bulk of the collection consists chiefly of Miss Miles' literary manuscripts, in various stages of completion, including her first poetry collection, Lines At Intersection, as well as her scholarly analysis, The Ways of the Poem. Individual poems number in the hundreds, while her word count studies, a method she devised to analyze the vocabulary of specific poets, are also included. A small amount of literary business papers and her numerous awards complete her literary career.
Miss Miles' teaching career and participation in activities on the University of California, Berkeley campus are also well documented. Numerous awards reflect her strong commitment to teaching as well as her literary talent. Miss Miles' own relationship as a student with the University of California is also fully documented, including her undergraduate and graduate work. A small amount of family correspondence and other personal papers completes the collection.
- Biographical / historical:
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Josephine Miles was born in Chicago on June 11, 1911 to Reginald Odber and Josephine Lackner Miles. Her father was of British ancestory and traced his decendants to the Mayflower; her mother migrated as a child from Germany and graduated from the University of Chicago. Josephine had two brothers, Richard B. and John O. Miles. Born with a dislocated hip that did not receive proper treatment, she suffered from severely crippling rheumatoid arthritis. When the arthritis worsened a couple of years later, the family moved to southern California. Josephine's grammar school career was so haphazard, she credited her mother with teaching her to read and write.
Miles graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA in 1932, and received her M.A. (1934) and Ph.D. (1938) from UC, Berkeley. At the age of twenty five, she won her first national prize for poetry, the Shelley Award, and her first book, Lines at Intersection was accepted for publication by Macmillan and Company. Miss Miles joined the English Department at UC Berkeley in 1940, won tenure in 1947, and was appointed University Professor in 1972. She was the first, and for many years the only, woman on the department faculty.
"Jo" Miles was one of the early architects of the Department of English's current curriculum, particularly in composition. Her "Prose Improvement Project" during the 1950s brought English Dept. teaching assistants together with those of 15 other departments in a broad effort to improve undergraduate's writing all over the campus. Her students have published more than 50 volumes of poems and won at least two national book awards. Miles methods helped form the Bay Area Writing Project, later renamed the California Writing Project, which trains teachers how best to teach writing.
Throughout her career, Miss Miles received many awards and much recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1964, and selected by her colleagues to fill the prestigious post of faculty research lecturer in 1975-76. In 1977, a committee of the Academic Senate gave her a distinguished teaching award. Collected Poems, 1930-1983, won The Nation magazine's Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the book was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1984, Miss Miles was the first writer to be honored by the Bay Area Book Reviewers with the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement.
Even after her retirement in 1978, Miles' home on Virginia Street, just north of the campus, remained a center of literary activity and many came to see the teacher, poet, and intensely involved member of the university community. Josephine Miles died of pneumonia at her home in Berkeley on May 12, 1985, at the age of 73.
- Acquisition information:
- The Josephine Miles Papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Miss Miles during the years 1974-1983, and by her estate on September 24, 1985.
- Physical location:
- For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog.
Access and use
- Location of this collection:
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University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft LibraryBerkeley, CA 94720-6000, US
- Contact:
- 510-642-6481