The papers contain personal and business correspondence, writings, personal papers, and financial records documenting the life and work of the American actress and author Mary Kennedy. Correspondents include her husband American composer Deems Taylor, authors Laura Bene?t, Pearl S. Buck, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, composer Samuel Barber, fashion designer Valentina, and colleagues from the theater world including Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, Margalo Gillmore, Helen Hayes, Clare Kummer, Annie Russell, and Marjorie and Roland Young. Family members well represented in the papers are Kennedy's mother Josephine Kennedy Maher, and her brothers James and Foster Kennedy, the latter also an author. Mary Kennedy wrote plays, novels, short stories, poetry, and children's books, and her papers contain drafts, corrected typescripts, and printed versions of her works. Also present are portrait photographs by some of the leading artists of the time, including Arnold Genthe, Ben Magid Rabinovitch, and Edward Steichen, and an autograph manuscript score by Samuel Barber for incidental music to accompany Kennedy's One Day of Spring (1935).