The bulk of the collection is letters to Dennie from literary and political colleagues; readers and subscribers of his various newspapers, especially the Farmer's Museum; and his Harvard classmates during his rustication, 1790, when he lived under a chaplain's supervision in Groton, Mass. Letters by Dennie are mostly to his parents and contain detailed accounts of his life from his school days throughout his career. Manuscripts consist of essays, poems, verse translations, college and school notes and exercises, and fragments by Dennie. Includes an original manuscript of his first Farrago essay. Third-party correspondence is mostly to his mother, much of it after his death.

• In English.

American essayist and editor, Dennie (Harvard College A.B. 1790) wrote for weekly papers in Walpole, N.H., Boston, Mass., and Philadelphia, Pa. He was closely associated with the Farmer's Weekly Museum of Walpole, for which he wrote "Lay Preacher" which under his editorship (1796- ) became a strong Federalist organ read throughout the union; and The Port Folio, a weekly devoted to literature and politics which he established in 1801 in Philadelphia with bookseller Asbury Dickins. This magazine was considered without rival until the founding of the North American Review in 1815.