Correspondence, memoranda, writings, speeches and lectures, reports, research notes, patient case files, psychiatric tests, transcripts of court proceedings, biographical information, newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, and other materials pertaining primarily to Wertham's career in psychiatry.

Topics include abused children, censorship, civil rights, the physiological effect of drugs, freedom of speech, juvenile delinquency, pornography, race relations and racism, sex crimes, violence, violence in comic books, mass media, motion pictures, and television, and violent crime. Includes materials relating to Wertham's testimony as an expert witness in desegregation cases; his work in New York, N.Y., with the Lafargue Clinic, a psychiatric clinic for African Americans, and the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center for sexually maladjusted individuals; and his art collection particularly paintings by El Lissitzky. Also includes notes, drafts, and related materials for Wertham's major works including Seduction of the Innocent (1954); a patient case file, correspondence, and writings by or about Wertham's patient, psychoanalyst Horace Westlake Frink, and correspondence between Frink and Sigmund Freud; and correspondence, writings, and other papers relating to Wertham's mentors, Emil Kraepelin and Adolf Meyer, and to his Lafargue associate, Hilde Mosse. Correspondents include Taylor Caldwell, Emil Arthur Gutheil, Langston Hughes, Ernest Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey, Ida Macalpine, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Ella Winter, and Richard Wright.