This collection consists of one piece of correspondence from Richard Kluger (editor from Atheneum Publishers) to Charles Fontenay. Kluger addresses questions raised by Fontenay in a letter dated 1971 March 7. In addition to correspondence, Kluger attached his ten-page commentary of an undated draft of Fontenay’s “Estes Kefauver: a biography.” Note: The final three folders contain approximately two hundred and seventy pages of an undated draft of Fontenay’s “Estes Kefauver: a biography.” It is unclear if this is the draft referenced by Kluger.
Click here for the Guide to Charles Fontenay’s Kefauver biography, drafts and commentary, circa 1971, mpa.202 / ms.2515. Collection location: row 11, box 24.
Charles Fontenay was born in 1917. He is the author of “Estes Kefauver: a biography” (1980). Fontenay died in 2007.
Estes Kefauver was born in Madisonville, Tennessee on July 26, 1903. He graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1924 before graduating from Yale Law School in 1927. He became a member of the bar in 1926 and practiced in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his firm, Kefauver, Duggan, and McDonald. In 1935, he married Nancy Patterson Pigott and they had four children.
Three years after an unsuccessful bid for the Tennessee State Senate in 1936, Kefauver served as Tennessee State commissioner of finance and taxation for a few months in 1939 before he was elected to the United States Congress where he served for ten years. In 1948, Kefauver was elected to the Senate where from 1949-1952 he held the position of chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce that gained him national fame. Kefauver was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination twice in 1952 and 1956. However, he served in the United States Senate as a Democratic representative for Tennessee until his death on August 10, 1963.