The Bryant Mangum American literature collection contains materials related to Bryant Mangum's scholarship on Alice Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Irwin Shaw, as well as early published works by Alice Adams and F. Scott Fitzgerald in magazines.

This collection includes copies of Mangum's book chapters, journal aticles, book reviews, fiction, and nonfiction, that he had bound into books. Related to Alice Adams, there is a typescript of her unpublished novel , unpublished poems, copies of her work that were published in magazines but uncollected in volumes, and a bibliography of her book reviews that was gathered by Mangum. The collection also contains correspondence from Alice Adams to Bryant Mangum. Mangum's side of the correspondence is held in the Alice Adams papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The collection contains drafts of headnotes and endnotes for (edited by Bryant Mangum) and magazines containing early or first printings of Fitzgerald's work. Additionally, the collection contains two versions of Irwin Shaw's "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," a pre-print of Mangum's analysis, and ephemera related to a lecture he gave on the topic.

The bulk of the collection consists of photocopies, with the exception of correspondence from Alice Adams to Bryant Mangum and whole issues of magazines containing work by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alice Adams. The names of these works are recorded in the item-level descriptions.