Where
are the archives of writers? How do we find and interact with them? How can
we promote their existence?
Writers
always write and overtime, they accumulate thousands of pages of diaries,
letters, rough drafts, and private notes.
Novelists, biographers, and others are infatuated with writer archives.
The
Writer, a wonderful magazine, had a story in its August issue about writer
archives, stating: “By studying the personal diaries, notes, drafts and letters
of writers, we often see a side of them not read in their books, and we can
trace how they developed as people and writers.”
The
whole thing sounds fascinating, to have access to the millions of words that
collected dust in a lifetime of writing.
Archives may not capture everything written by famous writers, but they
sure retain a lot of history and insight into the mind and life of the
writer. Imagine having access to one’s
email account and all of the private notes stored on one’s smartphone? Get the idea?
Some
writers may not give any thought to having an archive created, while others
believe the published record is all that should remain, and not the scraps of
ideas or partial thoughts that never saw the light of day for a reason. But many archives exist out there, and though
I’ve never gained access to one, they sound fascinating.
A few
archives were listed in the article, including these:
Maya
Angelou Papers (1958-1990) – New York Public Library
Ray
Bradbury – Indiana University
Truman
Capote Papers (1924-1984) – New York Public Library
E. E. Cummings
Papers (1916-1962) -- New York Public Library
Emily
Dickinson Collection – Harvard University
F. Scott
Fitzgerald – Princeton University
Jon
Steinbeck – National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA
Mark
Twain – University of CA, Berkeley
Ayn Rand
– The Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, CA
George
Orwell – University College in London
Toni
Morrison – Princeton University
Jack
Kerouac – New York Public Library
If you
go to www.wgfoundation.org, you’ll
find a way to search for the index of film, TV, and radio writers and the
repositories that hold their materials.
The Library of Congress, major libraries and universities, and select
museums tend to house writer archives.
But The Writers Guild Foundation Archive contains many unique and rare
items from the personal papers of prominent writers.
One
archive that’s fairly large is the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the
literary archive of The University of Texas at Austin. It contains one 36,000,000 manuscript pages
and a million books. It houses things
like a rare first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and one of the 48
complete Gutenberg Bibles.
Will
your work end up in an archive on e day?
As things move to the digital world, will an archive exist merely online
and not physically anywhere? Maybe one
day there will be an archive for my blog, where copious drafts fill drawers
upon drawers of massive filing cabinets.
I doubt it. There’s no evidence
of my blog beyond the posts that I make daily.
I don’t keep any written notes, even though I do write with a pen before
readers see the typed version.
Most
archives never see the light of day. A
few researches and historians might skim a select number of documents for a
handful of writers, but most collections rarely get read page for page. There just isn’t enough time in the day to
rummage through hand-written notes that were often drafted in cryptic forms.
I believe there’s interest and value in combing through a writer’s archive but I also believe that whatever was deemed good enough for publication when the author made such decisions is what we should look at. Everything else is just a refection of unfinished ideas and experiments that, for whatever reason, were left behind. We need a filter to help guide us and I trust that an author’s filter should be respected.
I believe there’s interest and value in combing through a writer’s archive but I also believe that whatever was deemed good enough for publication when the author made such decisions is what we should look at. Everything else is just a refection of unfinished ideas and experiments that, for whatever reason, were left behind. We need a filter to help guide us and I trust that an author’s filter should be respected.
One day
we’ll figure out how to read and record our thoughts. Will archives download the life we lived in
our imagination and judge it harshly?
Archives are one step removed from such a thing – but not far off. Archives give us a license to snoop on a
writer, to get a glimpse into their unpublished lives, private thoughts, secret
activities, and personal insecurities.
The life
of an archivist sounds both boring and exciting in our instance. But it would be cool to write a story about
an archive or archivist and how buried among millions of pieces of paper we
discover new truths, hidden facts, and rare glimpses into the mindsets of our
greatest writers.
Then, whomever writers such a book will eventually die and leave his or her papers behind for an archivist to curate. Then someone should write about he archivist and the process repeats itself, again and again.
Then, whomever writers such a book will eventually die and leave his or her papers behind for an archivist to curate. Then someone should write about he archivist and the process repeats itself, again and again.
Maybe
archives hold all kinds of secrets and insights – and perhaps they are worth
exploring. But I just hope that we
promote and protect the published writings of those we seek to define by what
was never supposed to see the light of day.
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Brian Feinblum’s views,
opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his
employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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