The General Manuscript Collection is an artificial collection of correspondence, diaries, lecture notes, class work, essays, administrative documents, minutes, and other documents collected by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Single items or very small collections are generally classified as part of the general manuscript collection rather than assigned an individual manuscript number. Additionally, small additions to existing RBML manuscript collections may be classified as part of the General Manuscript Collection.

Belmont (1878-1979) was an American actress and a prominent public figure. The collection includes correspondence, subject files, and personal materials.

Douglas Stuart Moore (1893-1969) was an American composer, educator, and author. His best known works include the operas The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937-1939), The Ballad of Baby Doe (1953-1956), and Giants in the Earth (1949-1950), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951. The papers include clippings, correspondence, course and lecture materials, librettos, photographs, programs, publicity materials, recordings, and scores.

A collection of letters from authors, critics, and scholars, primarily relating to lectureships and courses given under the auspices of the English Department. Some of the correspondence, notably the ten letters from Amy Lowell, deal with essays written for the revised edition of C.D. Warner's LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE. The letters are written to Ashley H. Thorndike, John W. Cunliffe, George R. Carpenter, Ernest H. Wright, and Marjorie Nicolson. The correspondents include John Mason Brown, Marchette Chute, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Padraic Colum, Bernard DeVoto, T.S. Eliot, John Erskine, Robert Frost, Otto Jespersen, Howard Mumford Jones, Joyce Kilmer, Ludwig Lewishon, Amy Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Thomas Mann, Brander Matthews, H.L. Mencken, Christopher Morley, Ezra Pound, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles P. Snow, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. Two boxes of miscellaneous uncataloged correspondence cover the years, 1896-1917, and a folder for the 1935 Mark Twain Centennial sponsored by the English Department. The correspondence is chiefly with Ernest Hunter Wright.

Correspondence, notes, articles, reports, and speeches of Gildersleeve, including materials relating to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, 1945, the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, the International Federation of University Women, the American Association of University Women, the American Council on Education, and the Near East College Association. The most note-worthy item in the collection is a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointing Dean Gildersleeve to serve as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Charter Conference of the United Nations. The collection also contains some material relating to Barnard College affairs.

The correspondence, research, and teaching files of French-American cultural historian and Columbia University professor emeritus Jacques Barzun (1907-2012).

This collection contains correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, documents, photographs, printed material and audiovisual material of Spruille Braden, 1894-1978, American diplomat and mining engineer.

Correspondence, manuscripts, dispatches, documents, clippings and other printed materials concerning his career as an editor and correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Moscow, Berlin and New York, as a staff member of the Institute of Pacific Relations from 1932 to 1934, as deputy director in the Office of War Information overseas branch, 1941-44, as an owner and editor of the New York Star, 1948-49, as an instructor in communications at Sarah Lawrence College, 1950-1951, as a book editor at Simon and Schuster, Publishers, 1951-1970, and as an author and translator.

The Herbert L. Matthews Papers contain the writings, correspondence, and personal papers of this American journalist, a correspondent and editorial writer for the New York Times from 1922 to 1967. Matthews' assignments spanned the world. As a journalist he covered the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and 1936, Spain and the Spanish Civil War, Italy, India, Europe and World War II, postwar Europe, Latin America; as an editor he wrote about Vietnam, China, and Latin America.

Approximately 12,000 letters to Allan Nevins from various correspondents including James Truslow Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Willa Cather, Frances Folsom Cleveland, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Frost, Newton D. Baker, Archibald MacLeish, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Carl Sandburg, and Henry Wallace; notes and typescripts for Nevins' books including Emergence of Lincoln, The Ordeal of Democracy, Rockefeller, and History and Historians, with notes by editor Ray A. Billington; miscellaneous transcripts, clippings, newspapers, and photographs. Also, autograph letters and manuscripts by presidents, Civil War figures, financiers, politicians, and authors. There are also the Brand Whitlock World War I Diaries and letters to him by such people as Herbert Hoover, Gen. John J. Pershing, and others.