Hallie Erminie Rives papers

Access and use

Location of collection:
University of Virginia, Special Collections Dept.
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library
University of Virginia
P.O. Box 400110
160 McCormick Rd
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4110
Contact for questions and access:
POC: Brenda Gunn
Phone: (434) 924-1037
Phone: (434) 243-1776
Fax: (434) 924-4968
Restrictions:

This collection is open for research.

This collection is open for research.

Preferred citation:

MSS 8090, Hallie Erminie Rives papers addition (2017-0149), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Summary

Extent:
0.5 Cubic Feet 8 folders (3 in first accession-boxed with MSS 808) and 5 in the addition in half-width legal size document box)
Language:
English
Preferred citation:

MSS 8090, Hallie Erminie Rives papers addition (2017-0149), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Background

Scope and content:

Correspondence files of the best-selling novelist Hallie Erminie Rives. 170 letters dated from 1892 to 1906, all written to Rives from editors, playwrights, producers, politicians, fans and many others. Among the correspondents are the Denver Post, Washington Magazine, Times Mirror Company, Empire Theatre, Woodard & Tieran Printing Co., Daily Story Publishing Company, Buffalo Courier, Baltimore News, Boston Herald, Collier's, New York Press. One ALS from Hall Caine, English novelist and playwright (29 November 1902) and from Howard Christy.

Biographical / historical:

Hallie Erminie Rives was born on May 2, 1874, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the daughter of Stephen Turner Rives and Mary Ragsdale. Her father was from a prominent Virginia family. She was a distant cousin of the novelist and poet Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. An author's biography in one of her books notes that her father fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and spent two years in a Northern prison camp.

Rives wrote her first novel at age eight. Her first novel was published when she was eighteen. In her novels she addressed politics between the Northern and Southern United States, issues of race, and sex, causing great debate among critics. Among them was Smoking Flax Archived 2010-08-18 at the Wayback Machine (1897), a novel controversial even at the time, which takes a favorable position on lynching. The novel is about an African American man accused of raping and murdering a white woman who was lynched after the governor commuted his sentence to life. Many of her novels were bestsellers.[4] Other books she wrote were better received by critics than Smoking Flax. Her novel, The Castaway, is noted for being the subject of a Supreme Court copyright case, Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, in which the US Supreme Court recognized the first sale doctrine, permitting purchasers of copies of books to resell them without seeking permission from the copyright holder.

She married Post Wheeler in 1906 in Tokyo. A wedding announcement noted that Wheeler initially considered Rives "rather severe on men" in her books and she considered him "none too charitable concerning the faults of women" in his book Reflections of a Bachelor. They met at a reception in New York and began a friendship that eventually led to marriage.[5] She accompanied him to posts across Europe, Asia and South America throughout his career in foreign service. She and her husband co-wrote Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1952 about their lives in the United States Foreign Service.

She died on August 16, 1956, in New York City, New York. Her widower died on Christmas Eve, December 23, 1956, at the Frances Convalescent Home in Neptune, New Jersey, just 4 months later. Works

The Singing Wire and Other Stories (1892) A Fool in Spots (1894) Smoking Flax (1897)[permanent dead link] As the Hart Panteth (1898) A Furnace of Earth (1900) Hearts Courageous (1902) The Castaway (1904)[8] In the Wake of War (1905) Satan Sanderson (1907), adapted to film The Kingdom of Slender Swords (1910) The Valiants of Virginia (1912) Tales from Dickens (1917) The Long Lane's Turning (1917) The Complete Book of Etiquette (1926) The Magic Man (1927) The Golden Barrier (1934) The John Book (1947) Dome of Many Coloured Glass (1952)

Source: "Hallie Erminie Rives" Wikipedia. Accessed 4/1/2026

Physical facet:
Hallie Erminie Rives correspondence, poems about her, photographs, and printed information
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Places:
Women authors, American