Stephen Bloom papers

Collection

Identifier: MsC1213

Staff Only
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Scope and Contents

This collection focuses on the professional career of award winning journalist, former Speech Writer and Press Secretary, bestselling author of narrative non-fiction and professor, Stephen G. Bloom.

The bulk of this collection is made up of drafts of manuscripts from his major novels and creative works, each accompanied by extensive research notes and correspondence, as well as promotional materials relating to each work's release. Each of these can be found in the PROJECTS series.

The Brazil Chronicles (University of Missouri Press), is the history of an eclectic English-language expat newspaper in Rio de Janeiro that dates to 1879. Bloom’s narrative work is exemplified by three other of his bestselling books, Postville (Harcourt, 2000), The Oxford Project (Welcome Books, 2008), and Tears of Mermaids (St. Martin’s, 2009). Postville details an escalating civil war between ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews and Lutherans in a rural Iowa meatpacking community.

The Oxford Project tells the intimate stories of 100 residents of Oxford, Iowa, a small town in Iowa over a 23-year period accompanied by the photographs of Peter Feldstein. Tears of Mermaids traces a single pearl from diver’s hand to woman’s neck. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality (University of California Press, 2021) is the story of the Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment, using eye color to simulate racism. In The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire,Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold (Regan Arts, 2018) Bloom paints with vivid imagery, the biography of a San Francisco libertine who performed fifty thousand hygienic, albeit illegal, abortions from 1906-1959. Other significant projects in this series is the "Iowa Journalists Oral History Project" and Three Seconds: A Murder, Place, and Time.

Live telephone hookup by Bloom coming out of Santiago, Chile can be found in the AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS series.

A sampling of Bloom's literary and journalism awards, honors, commemorative clippings,and Bloom's professional and personal ephemera make up the AWARDS AND EPHEMERA Series. Some of Bloom's personal ephemera includes identification cards, fliers from social gatherings and personal milestones,photographs, his plane ticket to Brazil, and a copy of Estadio Chile by Victor Jara. Professional ephemera includes official press badges from Bloom's time in Brazil.

Materials and correspondence related to grants and fellowships awarded to Stephen Bloom are listed out in the GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS series.

Press releases and articles about Bloom's short yet noteworthy time as press secretary to Mayor of San Francisco Frank Jordan for 71 days in 1992 make up the OFFICE OF THE MAYOR OF SAN FRANCISCO series.

In the OVERSIZE series, all oversize newspaper, magazine, and correspondence are filed together under this series.

Bloom's published articles and essays appearing in both academic journals and mass-circ magazines, and creative works make up the PUBLICATIONS series. Alongside these materials include a sampling of newspaper clippings from stories and news features published by major news agencies. News agencies and organizations include The Dallas Morning News, The Sacramento Bee, and The Los Angeles Times. Notes and news story ideas, drafts or "slugs," and correspondence can also be found in this series.

The PROFESSIONAL series includes the following subseries: Press and promotions,professional correspondence,professional portfolio, professional talks and events, and Teaching documents and projects. Teaching documents and projects focus on Bloom's time here at the University of Iowa and include syllabi, lectures, assignments, spot forms, correspondence, and "The Riverside Project" from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Dates

Creation: 1974 - 2022

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

The donor owns copyright in some of the collection, but the Collection also contains work for which other individuals or organizations own the copyrights.

The donor retains full ownership of copyright they hold in the donated materials, but grants the university a nonexclusive right to use and to authorize all non-commercial uses of these materials for research, scholarly, or other educational purposes pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial license.

Copyright status for other collection materials may be unknown. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owner.  Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility and potential liability based on copyright infringement for any use rests exclusively and solely with the user. Users must properly acknowledge University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives as the source of the material. For further information, visit the Special Collections and Archives website.

Biographical note

Stephen G. Bloom, an award-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, was born in August of 1951 in New Jersey. He is the author of seven nonfiction narrative books, three of them bestsellers. Having first attending the Washington University in St. Louis, Bloom received his BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971.

Bloom has been a National News Editor for the Latin American Daily Post, Brazil correspondent for Field News Service, and reporter for the Brazil Herald from 1979-1981. Stephen Bloom was a Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1984-1985, a Feature Writer for the San Jose Mercury News from 1986-1987, a Senior Writer for The Sacramento Bee from 1987-1991. In 1992, Bloom was Press Secretary and Speech Writer for San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan before coming to the University of Iowa in 1993 as an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He was granted tenure in 1997 and was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2004.

Bloom’s articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Chicago Tribune Magazine, Washington Post, and the London Guardian. In 2011, the city of Iowa City, one of 39 UNESCO Cities of Literature, selected Bloom for inclusion in its Literary Walk, a series of streets of commemorative plaques that honor writers with Iowa connections, including Flannery O’Conner, Kurt Vonnegut, W.P. Kinsella, Jane Smiley, Marvin Bell, and John Irving. In 2020, he was chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists as the university journalism professor of the year.

(Biographical note written by Stephen Bloom, and edited by Rachel Romero, 2024)