Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection: An Annotated Selection

William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

YOUNG-MEE YU CHO is a professor of Korean at Rutgers University. She published Integrated Korean, Korean Photographs in the William Elliot Griffis Collection, Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices, You Call That Music?! Korean Popular Music through the Generations, and Rereading Chang Lee Wook. 

SUNGMIN PARK co-authored two book chapters on the Griffis Collection published in Beyond the Book and The William Elliot Griffis Collection at Rutgers University Library. Currently, she works as the special formats cataloger/repository librarian at The College of New Jersey.

FERNANDA H. PERRONE is an archivist, head of the of the Exhibitions Program and curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick.

ROSS KING is a professor of Korean language and literature at the University of British Columbia.

SOO HUR is a professor of history at Seoul National University, Korea.