Restrictions to Access

This collection contains additional materials that are not available for immediate or same day access. Please contact Research and Instructional Service staff at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu to discuss options for consulting these materials.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Ernest Seeman Papers #4031, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Elizabeth Seeman of Erwin, Tennessee, in August 1978, and Mimi Conway of Washington, D.C., in April 1985.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Chuck Israel, October 1988

Encoded by: ByteManagers Inc., 2008

Updated by: Dawne Howard Lucas, February 2022

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Conway, Mimi.
• Diaries (Blank-books)
• Duke University Press.
• Eccentrics and eccentricities--North Carolina.
• Eccentrics and eccentricities--Tennessee.
• North Carolina--Intellectual life--20th century.
• Radicalism--North Carolina--History--20th century.
• Seeman Printery (Durham, N.C.)
• Seeman, Elizabeth.
• Seeman, Ernest, 1886-

• Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). Interviews with Ernest Seeman (B-12) and Elizabeth Seeman (G-55).

Ernest Seeman (1887-1979), the son of Henry Ernest and Bettie Albright Seeman, was a writer, publisher, and editor who lived in Durham, North Carolina, and in Unicoi County, near Erwin, Tennessee.

Seeman was hired to manage the Duke University Press in 1925 after serving as president of the family business, Seeman Printery Company of Durham, from 1917 to 1923. He helped expand the Press's catalogue of titles and was associate editor of a new psychological journal, Character and Personality. Seeman began writing while at Duke, publishing several essays in general interest and psychology magazines. Known as a campus radical, Seeman was fired in 1934 when he was accused of writing a satire on the Duke administration.

Seeman and his second wife, Elizabeth Brickel Seeman, settled in a primitive cabin in Tennessee in the early 1940s. For the next thirty-five years, Ernest Seeman wrote constantly as he and his wife battled poverty and, sometimes, near-starvation. He worked frequently on his book, Tobacco Town, which was published as American Gold in 1978. He also worked on several other novels and numerous essays. The Seemans founded a lending library for community children in 1965. Seeman died in Tennessee in 1979.

About half of this collection is composed of versions of writings by Ernest Seeman. There are several versions of Tobacco Town, some with suggestions and emendations by Mimi Conway, Seeman's editor. Other writings include several unfinished and unpublished novels and about twenty essays. A run of diary-notebooks will give researchers a view of Seeman's radical and independent ideas and activities in the 1930s and 1940s. A series of "Other Papers" includes six folders of correspondence. Although a prolific correspondent, according to Elizabeth Seeman, Ernest Seeman apparently saved few letters. There are also sketches in pencil by Ernest and Elizabeth Seeman.

A final box of unprocessed material also has been kept with the collection, illustrating the condition of most of Seeman's materials as they were received at the Southern Historical Collection and documenting the way Seeman apparently stored his research materials and other personal records. About twelve cubic feet (20,000 items) of jumbled and deteriorating scraps of notes and writings, routine correspondence, and other incidental material were discarded during processing.

• Photographs (P-4031/1-76) and unnumbered drawings
• Oversize drawings (OPF-4031/1)