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Originals privately held or no longer extant.

Wallace Hume Carothers, the discoverer of nylon, the first completely synthetic fiber, was born on April 27, 1896, in Burlington, Iowa. He studied chemistry at Tarkio College in Missouri and at the University of Illinois, where he received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1924. Carothers taught at Harvard between 1926 and 1928, when he was selected by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. to head its research unit in organic chemistry. Carothers committed suicide on April 29, 1937, the same year in which nylon was patented.

This collection of Carothers' papers consists of fourteen letters written to his former college girlfriend from Missouri, Frances Gelvin Spencer. The letters were copied from the originals in the possession of Mrs. Spencer before her death. They are almost entirely personal in nature, but one describes his work in the following terms, "We have been enormously lucky in our research so far. We have not only a synthetic rubber, but something theoretically more original -- a synthetic silk. If these two things can be nailed down, that will be enough for one lifetime."

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