Arthur Llewellyn Griffiths papers

The Arthur L. Griffiths Papers consist of writings by Griffiths, which he gave to the library during the period 1928-1944. Most of the writings concern his early adventures as an educator, official, and explorer in the Philippines in 1901-1903. Two-thirds of the collection is taken up by a manuscript draft of his memoirs, Wild Days in the Philippines, sent to Yale in 1944 after Griffiths completed a typescript version. Concerning this work he wrote to the librarian:

This takes in my personal adventures of forty years ago and closes with a perhaps spiritual reference to Bataan and Corregidor under the title heading of "The Crucible of Bataan and Corregidor". The final chapter has the heading, "The Star Spangled Banner Floats Forever"; this also in a highly thrilling and spiritual sense.

I put so much of my very soul into the writing of this book, and was so harrowed by recalling the past thrilling experiences, that I suffered from a "nervous stomach" for almost two years, and was carried to the hospital three times.

I wrote it out in pencil before I typewrote it and the pencil writing took up 37 pencil pads 9 by 13 inches, or 1,514 pages. I have every reason to believe that the book will have a wide circulation and be produced in the moving pictures.

There are, in fact, 39 pads as Griffiths prepared another draft of the final chapter.

Griffiths also wrote a memoir of Herbert Lucker, one of his co-appointees under the U.S. Philippine Commission in 1901. He sent a copy of it to the Alumni Records Office, and an electrostatic copy has been added to the collection.

The writings in the collection are all drafts of transcriptions; nothing is printed, and many items are not in final form. But in his letters to the library and the Alumni Records Office, Griffiths frequently expressed the hope that some of them would soon be published; and in 1951 he withdrew the manuscripts of three novels (Dageet: A Romance of the Head Hunter Mountains, Hell's Eden, and Jean Laurie) to send them to his literary agent. His only book-length publications, however, were Wild Scottish Clans and Bonnie Prince Charlie (1910), and One Wonderful Rose (1920), a novel co-authored with his second wife, Bertha J. (Weeks) Knowlton Griffiths. His Yale poem, Lux et Veritas with music by Leonard M. Thomas, appeared in Songs of Yale, and his The Blue of Eli Yale in the Yale Alumni Magazine. His poems Katahdin and The Pine Cone were published as broadsides (1927), and the latter was considered for adoption as Maine's state poem. He also wrote articles on the Philippine insurrection, which appeared in The Arena, (1904) and Pine Tree Magazine(1907), and on the Scottish clan system.

Many of the writings were on deteriorating paper. The collection was microfilmed and the originals discarded.