The collection contains correspondence and other materials relating to the family of American novelist and author John Hersey. Correspondence consists of letters from John Hersey and other members of the Hersey and Baird families to Roscoe Monroe and Grace Baird Hersey. There are letters from John Hersey to his parents dating from his graduate studies in Cambridge, England, in 1936 and 1937, to dispatches written as a war correspondent, in 1942, while in the South Pacific. Other materials include various family papers, such as John's school books, a copy of his undergraduate thesis, "The Letters of John Trumbull," clippings and printed ephemera, photographs, and manuscript notes by Roscoe Monroe Hersey. Photograph albums contain images of China, circa 1907 and 1908, the Hersey family, and France in WWI, and a scrapbook documents the lives of Hersey children starting in 1912.