Mailer sells his papers to Texas

[emad]

Gary Younge in New York
Saturday April 30, 2005
The Guardian

The American literary giant Norman Mailer has sold a vast collection of his papers to the University of Texas in Austin for $2.5m (£1.3m).

Mailer, 82, has handed over documents weighing almost nine tonnes and ranging from war letters he wrote to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, which formed the basis for his first published novel, The Naked and the Dead, to dog identification tags, sales receipts and cancelled cheques.

The collection, which was bought by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, also includes correspondence with the novelist and essayist James Baldwin on civil rights, the writer Joan Didion on literature and the poet Robert Lowell on Vietnam.

There are also a dozen finished screenplays, French aviation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1473839,00.html

[Twillig]

1. What's the deal with UT collecting papers of novelists?

They got Delillo a while back, now Mailer.

At least it was UT, if it was Texas A&M you could expect the worlds biggest literary bonfire, maybe.

[Voltaire99]

2. I love Mailer.

One of the lights of the past century, still burning brightly in this one. It's a somber realization that, with the selling of his papers, he is attending to the business at life's end.

His comment on post-911 "patriotism" is a classic:

"My feeling is that you're patriotic about America if you're obsessed with America because it's a democracy, and its obligation is to improve all the time, not to stop and take bows and smell its armpits and say 'Ambrosia!'"