Correspondence, diaries and journals, family papers, drafts of articles, poems, novels, short stories, speeches, and other writings, scrapbooks, financial papers, printed matter, and other papers. Includes partial manuscript and dramatizations of Wister's best-known work, The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains (1902) and his libretto for "Villon; a Romantic Opera in Four Acts." Family correspondents include Fanny Kemble (Wister's grandmother), Sarah Butler Wister (his mother), Mary Channing Wister (his wife), and his cousins, S. Weir Mitchell and Langdon Elwyn Mitchell.

Other correspondents include Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, Edward William Bok, Nicholas Murray Butler, John Jay Chapman, Joseph H. Coit, Richard Harding Davis, Charles W. Eliot, John Watson Foster, Hamlin Garland, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Lee Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Henry James, William James, J. J. Jusserand, Rudyard Kipling, Kirke La Shelle, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Eliot Norton, Walter Hines Page, Frederic Remington, Alice Repplier, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Upton Sinclair, Sir Campbell Stuart, William Howard Taft, Barrett Wendell, Edith Wharton, William Allen White, and Caspar Whitney.