The Edgar Snow Papers are divided into seven sections which reflect Edgar Snow's contribution to American journalism and Sino-American relations. In general, the papers are straightforward in their contents and are arranged to follow the course of Snow's life work: personal and business correspondence; diaries and notebooks; notes related to manuscripts and interviews; various drafts and revisions of both article and book manuscripts; clippings of published articles and book reviews; research materials; photographs; audio tape and film material, the majority of which were compiled for his documentary, "One Fourth of Humanity."

The Edgar Snow Papers were received in installments, and an overall organizational scheme for the papers did not exist. Though often individual folders or groupings of folders had an internal order, there is some question whether this was, in fact, Snow's doing. It is likely that some of the ordering was established by individuals Lois Snow hired to process the papers before the University Archives gained possession. However, whenever possible, the papers have been retained in the order in which they were received.

Though the papers are arranged into sections, materials related to one section may be located within another. Generally, the sections are sorted chronologically, or in some cases alphabetically, due to the nature of the subseries. Subject groupings within the general correspondence have been filed following the general correspondence for the year in which the grouping begins. Undated materials are located at each section's end. When necessary, introductory paragraphs and additional descriptive notes have been added to the inventory listing. The sections concerning book-related correspondence, book reviews, articles about Edgar Snow, and his research materials, also contain items written by others after Snow's death.

Note on Chinese romanization: within the introduction and descriptive paragraphs, the modern Pinyin system has been used (for example "Beijing"). Elsewhere within the inventory the Wade-Giles system, used during the period Edgar Snow was writing, is employed for article titles, folder headings, etc. Thus, for example, Beijing is written as "Peking". All proper Chinese names have been conformed to the following standard: Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, etc.