Consists of curriculum vitae and biographical sketches of Thorp's career, clippings about Thorp, early writings and school records, diplomas, transcripts of oral history interviews with Thorp, and travel-related materials. The subseries also includes information about Thorp's two marriages and divorce, a minor personal lawsuit, and several of Thorp's hobbies. Two boxes of realia are included in this subseries.

consists of account books, receipts, wine-cellar inventories, and tax-related documents. It includes correspondence of Clarice Brows Thorp during several months of 1952, when the Thorps were planning their move from Washington, D.C. to Amherst and undertaking renovation of their Harkness Road home.

The scrapbooks include numerous clippings, correspondence, invitations, and additional ephemera documenting the years when Thorp became a nationally-known figure in the field of economics. They document the particularly eventful year of 1933-1934, when Thorp served as Director of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce until the Senate blocked his confirmation. The scrapbooks provide details of Thorp's continued career in public service and as Director of Economic Research for Dunn and Bradstreet for the remainder of the 1930s.

The collection's photographs provide a nearly comprehensive photographic document of Thorp's career. They include professional portraits from the 1930s and 1940s as well as official and unofficial photographs of Thorp's work with the United Nations in the 1960s. This subseries also includes numerous family and ancestral photographs in addition to many unlabeled snapshots from the Thorps' travels. Photographs of the Amherst Class of 1920 (from 1920 and 1970) are also part of this subseries.

Contains records of Thorp's career-long relationship with NBER, a non-partisan economic research organization founded in 1920. The subseries consists primarily of correspondence, meeting minutes, printed material, reports, and conference papers.

Consists of materials Thorp gathered in the course of teaching at the college for nearly twenty years, while serving on various committees and on the Board of Trustees (1942-1955), and while serving as interim College President briefly in 1957. Documentation of the latter two roles is fragmentary. The subseries also includes Thorp's correspondence with college offices and affiliated organizations, including the fraternity Chi Phi, of which he was a member, and the Class of 1920. A small amount of material documents responses to the student-led protests in 1969 and 1970 ("The Moratoria"). Materials include correspondence, open letters, minutes, reports, memoranda, printed material, syllabi, and exams. Where possible, folders have been grouped by Amherst organization or department and arranged chronologically within each grouping.

Consists of a small amount of material (3 folders) collected during Thorp's work for the business information company as a researcher and as founding editor of Dunn's Review. Materials include clippings, speeches, editorials, and printed material.

Includes materials gathered after Thorp was recruited into President Roosevelt's "Brain Trust," whose members crafted the economic policies of the New Deal. Materials here provide a rich but incomplete history of Thorp's work for several government agencies and boards. It includes materials related to the Federal Alcohol Control Administration; which managed the end of Prohibition. This subseries also documents Thorp's role as Director of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Research and his subsequent failure to receive Senate confirmation to that post; his advisory role to the National Recovery Administration and the Commerce Department; and his service on the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC). Materials include correspondence, notes, clippings, reports, transcripts of Congressional testimony, speeches, press releases, minutes, and printed material.

Documents collected by Thorp in his capacity as one of two trustees appointed by a Federal court to oversee reorganization of the bankrupt Associated Gas and Electric System (AGE), the third largest utility system in the U.S. Reorganization was mandated after a lengthy investigation of the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation had uncovered a massive pyramid scheme devised by Howard Hobson, the founder of the two companies that made up AGE (AGEco and AGEcorp). Materials in the collection include correspondence, memoranda, office diaries, legal documents, spreadsheets, reports, and printed material. Where a clear original order existed, as with binders of correspondence, memoranda, and office diaries, this order has been maintained. Remaining material has been grouped by general topic.

The materials in this subseries were gathered by Thorp during his service as Deputy Assistant and then Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs (1945-1952) and in the course of a series of appointments in the 1960s. The materials Thorp retained from his work at the State Department consist largely of speeches and notes for speeches on distinct topics that he gave at a wide variety of institutions to immensely varied audiences between 1945 and 1952. Many of these were these were public statements and addresses; others were for a limited audience of government officials. This portion of the collection also includes some correspondence, memoranda, notes, organizational charts, and directories.

Thorp's Chairmanship of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, his role as the U.S. delegate to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and his other activities in the field of international development are more thoroughly documented with memoranda, minutes, correspondence, reports, and printed material. The Thorps' extremely full social calendar during their years in Paris, Geneva, and elsewhere in Europe is documented through correspondence, menus, and invitations. Willard Thorp's relatively brief official research trips to the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and to Bolivia in 1961 are also well documented with correspondence, reports, and printed material.

Materials are organized into sections by organization or agency and chronologically within each section. Speeches (1945-1952) are contained in a subsection of the Department of State materials (Boxes 28 and 29). Maintaining Thorp's organization of these materials, these folders contain U.N. and GATT speeches as well as addresses delivered in his capacity as Assistant Secretary of State. The United Nations section contains some retrospective material on Thorp's overlapping roles and activities in the 1960s.

The materials in this subseries encompass most of Thorp's professional and scholarly activities outside of his government service and employment at Amherst College. Included are appointment books, speeches, scholarly and humorous writings, book reviews, conference proceedings, and correspondence and minutes documenting his involvement with professional associations. Included as well are syllabi and correspondence related to Thorp's guest teaching at the Army and National War Colleges, at the University of Florida, and as Honors Examiner at Swarthmore College. Thorp served as Chairman for several years of the Claremont-Bologna international economic conferences and his work in this regard, especially between 1968 and 1983, is well documented in the collection.

This subseries contains some documentation of Thorp's corporate and institutional board membership. It also contains extensive documentation of four legal cases in which he was involved as an expert economic analyst or witness. Three of these involved major U.S. oil companies; the fourth concerned price-fixing by dozens of electrical equipment manufacturers. In the United States v. Arkansas Fuel Oil, et al., Thorp was a consultant to a group of 29 U.S. oil companies indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for plotting to fix oil and gas prices during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. A federal district court judge acquitted the defendants in February, 1960. In the "ECA" case, the U.S. government lodged a series of complaints against several oil companies, claiming that they had overcharged for crude oil purchased with dollars for eventual sale to countries included the Marshall Plan. Thorp's research provided evidence that they had not done so. Thorp's precise role in a third oil case-The Federal Trade Commission v. Texaco-is less clear. The collection also contains extensive material relating to the Anti-trust Investigation Group (ATIG). In February, 1961, a large number of U.S. electrical equipment manufacturers were found guilty in Federal court of price-fixing. A consortium of the victims-a large number of American utility companies and government entities-wanted to know to what extent damage claims would be justified. They hired Thorp and Jerry Cohen of Columbia University to assemble price data research for use by their attorneys. The collection includes Thorp's subject files and correspondence related to the case. These files contain notes, spreadsheets, correspondence, meeting minutes, reports and draft reports, legal proceedings, clippings, and additional printed material. For additional information on the legal proceedings, see Charles A. Bane. The Electrical Equipment Conspiracies: the treble damage actions. New York: Federal Legal Publications, 1973. The subseries contains some additional documentation of Thorp's consulting work and expert testimony and a series of subject files on economic topics.

The final section of this subseries includes retrospective views of the Marshall Plan and Point IV (Thorp's and others') as well as writings by unidentified authors.

Much of the correspondence in the collection associated with specific professional activities is filed in the subseries that documents each activity. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, Thorp appears to have maintained comprehensive, alphabetically-indexed correspondence files. Thorp's organization has been preserved to the extent possible in the alphabetically-organized section of this subseries. His original index file with cross-references and his contacts file are part of this subseries (Boxes 66, 67, and 68).

In the alphabetically-arranged correspondence, the section for each alphabetic letter contains correspondence from individuals (in alpha order), correspondence from organizations and institutions (in alpha order), followed by a general folder for that alphabetic letter.