William Andrews Clark Jr. devoted his inherited fortune to his literary and artistic interests, which focused on the seventeenth-century English poet and dramatist John Dryden and more generally on English culture from 1640 to 1750. He also secured an extensive collection of works by and about Oscar Wilde and lesser collections in a variety of areas, ranging from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to western Americana. In 1926 he donated his books and the library he built for them to the University of California, Southern Branch (now UCLA); named for his father, it was the first important gift to that institution. Through his generosity Clark, in the words of William Andrews Clark Memorial Library director Lawrence Clark Powell, "joined the select company of American book-collectors whose bequests are among the glories of [America's] national library strength."

Clark was the fourth child and second son of William Andrews and Katherine Louise Stauffer Clark...