Constantinos Lardas’ correspondence is the backbone of his collection. It covers all aspects of his life. The inevitable acceptance and rejection letters which Lardas kept and filed separately are in their own subseries. Other letters have been filed simply in date order. These include both personal and business correspondence in batches of fewer than five letters. In this treasure trove are letters both in Greek and English from cousins, aunts, and godchildren.

The vast majority of the letters come in large batches from friends, or family members or even publishing firms. They come with other letters, with clippings, with photographs, with memorabilia, with postcards, with essays, with poems and tucked into greeting cards. Wanting the collection to be as complete as possible, Lardas wrote to his friends asking them to return the letters he had written to them over the years. In many cases, the friends obliged but returned only photocopies claiming that the originals were too precious to be parted from. Lardas clearly spent hours re-reading, and sorting these personal letters, adding full names and dates to many of them before donating the collection to Brown University. He also frequently jotted down a sentence or two which explains who the correspondent is and in many cases the writer’s relationship with himself. Most letters were carefully refolded and stacked in tidy circles inside boxes in which erasable typing paper was originally purchased. Since Lardas was a stamp collector, many of the envelopes have had their stamps removed. Many letters are in Greek and some are in both Greek and English. It is important to note that while Lardas’s letters to Sophia and to their sons, written mostly when he was in school at Ann Arbor when the family remained in Pittsburgh, are included in the collection, there are no letters from Sophia to her husband at all.

Almost all incoming letters were addressed both to Constantinos and to his wife, Sophia. Any letters addressed only to him or only to her are interfiled just as he left them. Letters from each correspondent or family have been sorted by date. If there are only a few of Lardas’ letters to an individual correspondent available, they have been interfiled with the incoming letters in the same folder. If there are many, Lardas’ letters have been filed in a separate folder placed next to one containing the incoming letters. This enables the reader to follow literary arguments and daily life in chronological order. In the case of couples, letters from both spouses remain interfiled as Lardas left them. This means that Evangeline’s letters are filed with those of her husband James Lardas, Popie’s letters are filed with those of her husband Kimon Lardas , Philip and Sarah Ramp are interfiled, Earl Rovit’s letters alternate with those from his children and Victor Perere’s letters are interfiled with Padma’s even after their divorce. Lardas alphabetized correspondents by their most commonly used name : Patty Hooper is not filed under her married name of Everhardus and Padma Perere is not filed under her maiden name of Hejmadi.

Basic knowledge of the Lardas family tree is useful for understanding the letters in the collection. The parents were Nikolaos D. and Constantina nee Moraites. There are many folders of their letters to Lardas, all of them in Greek with the occasional intrusion of an English word or phrase. They were born in Icaria and returned there from time to time. The father owned his own construction business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which at one point or another employed many members of his extended family. In their later years, they divided their time between Pittsburgh and Bradenton, Florida eventually settling on Anna Maria Island. This barrier island became the summer home of many in the Lardas family and the permanent home of many others including Constantinos and Sophia.

James was the oldest son of Nikolaos and Constantina. He joined the United States army toward the very end of World War II and trained as a medical assistant. His letters home from various American army posts and eventually the Philippines and occupied Japan are full of his concern for the family he left behind in Pittsburgh. He worries that Constantinos and Kimon are not taking school seriously enough and that their father is working too hard. His letters from the Philippines discuss the army’s preparations for handling the horrific casualties which would have resulted from the expected invasion of Japan. On his return to Pittsburgh, he married Evangelina and they had three children : Constance, Nick and Emanuel. Constance, who returned to Pittsburgh to the family home to have her baby, is featured in a clipping from 1988. Emanuel’s wedding program is among Lardas’s memorabilia.

Constantinos was the middle child. He and Sophie nee Lacios had three sons : Nicholas, George and Stephen. There are letters from all three sons at various stages of their development from childish scrawls to thank you notes for generous help with weddings. All three of the sons married and before Lardas’s death five granddaughters arrived : Sophie, Alexa, Callie, Rainia and Konstantina. There are several letters in the collection from Sophie Mae, the oldest daughter of his oldest son, Nicholas.

The youngest son of Nikolaos and Constantina was Kimon who married Popie. Their children were Irene or Renie, Constandina or Dina and John. There are carefully printed early letters from the young Kimon as well as later letters from his wife, one of which has enclosed a picture of Kimon and his two toddler daughters. Both daughters write Christmas thank you letters to their aunt and uncle as children and discuss trips to Greece as young adults. The program from John’s Master of Divinity ceremony is among the memorabilia.

A survey of names with spelling variations is as helpful as knowledge of the family tree. Constantinos is often addressed as Konstantinos, Kosta, Kostas, Kos, Costa, Costas, Gus, or even Gust. He signed many of his letters simply “K”. His wife’s name is often rendered as Sofia, Sophie or Sofie. His son Nicholas is referred to as Nik, Nikos, and Nick. His son Stephen is called Steve, Steven, Stephan, Staphan and Stefani or even occasionally Chuckles. Kimon’s name is often spelled Kemon. Robert Stevens Bronson is Robert or Bob in early letters and becomes Steve, or even occasionally Stefani, in later letters. The Perere’s last name is occasionally spelled Perera. Earl Rovit signs many of his letters as Bud and his office notes as Parmenides or simply with the Greek letter Pi.

Besides his extended family, the most important influence in Lardas’s life was the time he spent at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, affectionately referred to by many correspondents as A2. The circle of students which surrounded Austin Warren and participated in the Hopwood Room teas presided over by Mary Cooley remained central to Lardas’s professional and personal development. In no particular order they include Ramsey Fowler, Robert Stevens Bronson, Patty Hooper, Austin Warren and his wife Antonia (Toni), Jeffrey Mitchell, Tony Stoneburner, George Abbott White, Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Meese, Jerome Badanes, Sophia Steriades Morgan, Padma and Victor Perere.

Other important correspondents are Lawrence Lee, Lardas’s undergraduate mentor at the University of Pittsburgh, Lauriston L. Scaife, his classics professor at Pittsburgh, Glauco Cambon who was at Columbia at the same time Lardas was studying for his master’s, Earl Rovit who shared an office with Lardas at CCNY, and Nikos Gatsos, the subject of Lardas’s dissertation.

Lardas’s students often continued to write him years after they left his CCNY classroom. There are letters from Mohan Raj, James Patton, and Barbara Novack for example. And there are letters from college friends in Pittsburgh : Anthony Papalas who became an expert on Icarian history and Nikos Flocos who also became a poet and teacher.

While the correspondence is the largest series, the most important series for the student of comparative literature are those which contain Lardas’s literary output. Lardas had presorted most of the manuscripts and filed the poetry in alphabetical order before sending the materials to Brown. Each folder contains all the various drafts and typed forms and in many cases a final published form as well. The short stories and essays do not have the same amount of documentation but are also filed in alphabetical order.

The photographs series is incomplete at best. There are for example a bridal candid of Constantinos and Sophia Lardas in 1951, a snapshot of the two older Lardas boys at the Acropolis, some candids of Lardas at Ann Arbor in the early 1960’s, but most of the photographs have presumably stayed with the family.

Bulletins from funeral services and graduation ceremonies, birth and wedding announcements are the kinds of materials filed in the memorabilia series. Posters for poetry readings, the Cunard Line passenger list for 1951 and the T.S.S. Olympia passenger list from 1962 along with a rubbing of the gravestone of Herman Melville areother examples. The clippings which include book reviews and articles on Lardas family members whose activities like catching fish, playing in sports tournaments, and opening stores made it into newsprint compliment the memorabilia.

The collection closes with a series called writings by others which includes all the poetry and prose sent to Lardas by his friends and students which were not actually attached to letters. These are filed alphabetically by author. There are also a few single issues of serials foldered and entered as the last series. Most of the serials and all of the books from the collection have been separated from the archival papers and cataloged for the Brown University collections.