In 2014, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Toni Morrison, and Flannery OâConnor, four of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, placed their papers in academic libraries. Two of these authors, Billy Collins and Toni Morrison, selected their own repositories. Collins chose the University of Texas at Austin, home to the Harry Ransom Center, which he described as âthe best orphanage in the world.â1 Morrison picked the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University. The University of Illinois acquired the literary collection of Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, while Emory University obtained the archives of Flannery OâConnor, who died in 1964.
The national news media enthusiastically recounted these acquisitions. National Public Radio reported that the Ransom Center now included Collinsâs âjottings on cocktail napkins, envelopes and other scraps.â Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton University president, recounted in Time that âthis extraordinary resource [of Morrisonâs papers] will provide scholars and students with unprecedented insights.â The Chicago Tribune delighted readers with the fact that âthe venerated poetâ Gwendolyn Brooks ârecorded everything she ate in spiral-bound notebooks,â while the New York Times explained OâConnorâs boxes included âcharming juvenilia, including a hand-lettered childrenâs book about a goose.â2 Each of these articles focused on how ephemera related to an authorâs private life highlight the relationships, habits, and intellectual environment authors bring to bear on their work. Such documents provide powerful contextual clues about the milieu in which a writer produced his or her texts. While the public is fascinated by the unique and surprising contents of writersâ papers, scholars are preoccupied by the ability of these documents to capture the personal beside the professional. But this charm does not come cheap.
Financial Value
Writersâ cultural capital, generated by public and scholarly interest, allows them to sell as well as donate their papers. When sold, prices may range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The cost of these papers defines which institutions choose to compete on the literary archives marketplace, favoring American universities with high endowments. The relative monopoly certain universities enjoy does not mean that they, or their competitors, feel satisfied with the marketâs current dynamics. Many repositories in the United States are frustrated with how the marketâs prices inflated over time.
Bookseller Glenn Horowitz, who often represents writersâ collections, noted that his first literary collection sale of poet W. S. Merwinâs papers sold for â$185,000 in 1983ââa small sum compared with novelist Vladimir Nabokovâs papers, which are âwidely believed to have been the first archive sale to top $1 millionâ in 1992. Novelist Norman Mailer obtained $2.5 million. Poet Allen Ginsbergâs papers sold for $980,000. Prices for âtypicalâ literary archives are between â$50,000 and $250,000,â although writers associated with more modest prices are less likely to share their earnings.3 Native American poet N. Scott Momaday received $500,000, a slightly above-average price but below the payments accorded to others. Nevertheless, Momaday felt satisfied by the exchange. He told the Wall Street Journal what he was paid even though Yale attempted to protect his privacy by refusing to comment.4
Institutions outside the United States are alarmed by the cost of writersâ papers as they lose the opportunity to keep their cultural heritage at home when authors sell their collections to more moneyed American repositories. British academics lament that âthe struggle to preserve valuable papers within the United Kingdom is always challenged by the deeper coffers and wealthier benefactors of American . . . libraries and private collections.â5 The primary American offender is the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For example, the Guardian reported that Jim Crace sold his papers to the Ransom Center for âa six-figure sum (in pounds, not dollars),â a price an unnamed university in England could not match. In frustration at their inability to compete, British archivists updated the proverb that âtwo things are inevitable: death and taxes.â Now, they say, âtwo things are inevitable: death and Texas.â6
Even literature documents the Ransom Centerâs reach: Brian Friel dramatized the problem in Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997). In the play, Friel depicts the anxiety Tom Connolly, an Irish writer, feels when a university representative comes to evaluate his papers. After a scene in which Connolly debates what David Knight, âthe agent from that University in Texas,â meant when Knight said Connollyâs papers were âsubstantial,â Connolly begins to show how much stress he is under. Daisy, his wife, calms him: âMy hope would be that he makes you a worthy offer . . . Because that acknowledgement, that affirmation might give youâwhatever it isâthe courage?âthe equilibrium?âthe necessary self-esteem?âjust to hold on. Isnât that what everyone needs? So for that reason alone I really hope he does buy the stuff.â7 If Knight acquires Tom Connollyâs papers at a good price, Tomâs literary collection will give the family financial security. But Daisy concludes that Tomâs creativity would be stymied if he sold his papers because Tom would become too confident. The play ends before the audience learns what Knight will offer for the collection and if Tom accepts his price or follows Daisyâs advice, but the turn between the Connolly familyâs desperation to sell in the first act and Daisyâs reticence in the second illustrates the potential conflict between an authorâs financial and emotional needs.
Give Me Your Answer, Do! downplays the problems American institutions incite when they seek the papers of international authors. Friel shows only Texasâs wealth and ambition, not its competition with other repositories. In real life, however, many of these institutions fight back to keep the papers of their nationâs writers at home. For example, to keep national manuscripts in British hands, the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester founded the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM) in 2005, the same year the United Kingdom Literary Heritage Working Group began to create a strategy to âraise awareness of the value of archives, offer guidance to writers over committing their papers and urge the government to offer tax incentives to living writers rather than to estates of the deceased.â8 Its outreach helped British writers become more aware of the importance of their archives to their home country.
Such outreach was essential as more American universities entered the field. Emory Universityâs Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library also is interested in British literary archives. The university paid $600,000 for Poet Laureate Ted Hughesâs papers and an âundisclosed sumâ for those of Best of the Booker award winner Salman Rushdie. However, Emory does not focus only on British papers. In 2007, the university purchased American novelist Alice Walkerâs papers for around $1 million. But Emoryâs collecting policy favors writers from a third countryâIreland.9 Emory decided to focus on the country as it had a rich literary heritage that had yet to be systematically collected. Now Emory holds most manuscripts related to the Belfast Group, a set of writers who dramatically reshaped the landscape of Anglophone poetry and whose most notable member, Seamus Heaney, would go on to win the Nobel Prize.
Whether British or American, many archivists and librarians believe that literary archives should not be sold. As costs rise, archivists and librarians note how their institutions struggle to provide the funding needed to continue supporting new acquisitions. Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, commented that donations are decreasing while individual items can cost âhundreds of thousands of dollars.â10 Public institutions can accept donations of literary archives but cannot always pay for them due to lower funding levels. Even when they can pay, representatives from such schools often are not able to match the offers of their more-moneyed peers.11
Complaints about the high price for literary archives do not come solely from universities struggling to build their profile in contemporary literature. Major players, like the Ransom Center, also feel the strain of high prices. Stephen Enniss, the centerâs director, revealed how much his repository spent on Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâs papersâ$2.2 millionâonly after the Associated Press and the Austin American-Statesman filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Enniss protested that âour competitive position is erodedâ now that the cost of GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâs collection became public, for âwe canât negotiate without showing the larger market our vulnerability.â12 Enniss did not want the price the Ransom Center paid for GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâs papers to be known because he believes that other authors will then expect higher amounts for their materials. Ennissâs words demonstrate that although foreign and domestic repositories are frustrated that they cannot compete against their well-funded competitors for literary archives, the Ransom Center itself is beginning to complain about the costs associated with the trade.
Yet the market persists. Despite growing institutional objections to high costs, libraries need to continue acquiring research collections, and most writers prefer to sell their papers as Billy Collins and Toni Morrison did. Dan Piepenbring, reporting for the Paris Review, noted how ubiquitous the idea was: âOne good thing about getting older, though, is that you can sell your papersâyou know, all that junk that records your âprocess.ââ While Piepenbring jokes that literary archives are junk and dismisses scholarship based on them as creating an artificial understanding of how composition occurs, the market remains attractive to authors. Those who participate in the trade can profit; this prospect is too enticing to ignore. Even deceased authors get in on the game. When authors die before they can choose a repository for their papers, the executors employed to maximize estate assets also prefer to sell their literary archives. As the Wall Street Journal wryly commented, whether an author is living is beside the point: âBeing dead helps but isnât required.â13
Authors nevertheless find the process of transferring their archives from their homes to a repository emotionally fraught. Phillip Lopate noted that âthe most gratifying event to have occurred this past yearâmy ambivalence about surrendering them asideâwas selling my papers to Yale Universityâs Beinecke Library.â Lopate did not enjoy the undertaking, which required approaching several repositories, enduring appraisers who determined his papersâ value, and waiting for universities to decide whether they were interested in his work. Lopate particularly resented the appraisal process, which required setting a financial value for a lifetime of work based on external market considerations. Lopate remarked that the men and women who came to survey his collection took only two hours to determine his papersâ worth and maintained clinically detached expressions as they examined the intimate details of his life.14 The process of transforming personal papers into a literary archive may be lucrative, but it requires writers to see their work as a commodity.
Appraisal can provoke an authorâs sense of competitiveness. Creating a literary archive out of an authorâs personal papers does not just commodify the work but also commodifies the life. Papers document a writerâs experiences in addition to his or her creativity. If another author obtains a certain sum for his or her collection, why is it that the amount is higher or lower? Is it because that writer had a more interesting life? Or is it because the personâs work obtained higher critical recognition? Or is it that oneâs peer found more popular success?
Once authors know what other authors can earn by selling their papers to repositories, they see that price as an anchor and are more likely to argue that their value is equalâor higher. As a result, library directors and curators try to conceal the amounts they pay partially to keep writers from negotiating their rate. Ennissâs desire to suppress the amount paid by the Ransom Center for GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâs papers is a result of this concern. Other repositories manage authorsâ egos differently. Emory University either agrees to pay or not to pay the amount a third-party appraiser quotes for a collection; it does not negotiate with an author to find a lower price. This strategy keeps financial evaluations outside the universityâs control, simultaneously eliminating the need to negotiate with authors while maintaining their goodwill. In contrast, Washington University in St. Louis does not rule out negotiating acquisition prices with its authors, although it avoids comparing and contrasting prices among its writers.15 While some institutions do not negotiate whereas others are open to debate, most institutions avoid public disclosure of prices.
Despite these emotions, authors are the winners in the literary archives marketplace. That is, writers who command enough scholarly and public interest to generate high prices for their papers are the tradeâs beneficiaries. For as long as their materials are in demand, repositories will have to pay. However, capturing scholarly and public interest is difficult. Even when a writer achieves acclaim, their status among scholars and the public must remain constant, or show signs of growing, to fetch a high price in the trade.