Mailer’s Vast Archives to Be Housed in Texas

Sometime this summer, the archives of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer will be trucked to central Texas from the warehouse in Pennsylvania where the 20,000 pounds of letters, manuscripts and memorabilia collected over seven often-turbulent decades have been stored.

Purchased for $2.5 million by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the collection includes Mailer’s report cards, car repair bills, drafts of his 40-plus books as well as unpublished short stories.

It “is the Platonic conception of what an archive should be,” said Thomas F. Staley, director of the research center. Mailer, in Austin last week for the announcement of the sale, said that he had left it up to others to catalog his past and wasn’t entirely sure what was in all of the file boxes -- “I’m haunted by what they might find,” he said. Mailer, 82, has been married six times and has nine children.

Texas may seem to be an offbeat choice for the archives of an East Coast writer, but Mailer said his relationship with the state dated to World War II, when he was attached to an Army combat troop from San Antonio that served in the Philippines. It was a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience that left him with “the most intense feelings about Texas, pro and con,” he said.

Mailer said he wondered if the sale would cause a local politician -- or as he put it, “some damn fool Texas legislator” -- to demand to know why state funds were spent on the likes of him. But in the end, he decided to leave his papers at the University of Texas because of the reputation of the Ransom Center, which he said housed “the greatest collection of literary archives to be found in America.”

The center, founded in 1957, has 36 million pages of manuscripts and more than 100,000 works of art and design. Vivien Leigh’s green curtain dress from “Gone With the Wind” is here, as are the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which were acquired in 2003 for $5 million.

Mailer’s collection began when his mother saved stories he wrote at 8 (“Adventures of Bob and Paul”) and 11 (“The Martian Invasion”).

By the late 1960s, the author’s archives were so voluminous that space was rented in Manhattan to store it all. Twelve years ago the collection was moved to a warehouse in Pittston, Pa., said J. Michael Lennon, an English professor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and archivist of the Mailer collection. “We had more room there,” he said.

Glenn Horowitz, a New York bookseller who brokered the sale, said he first contacted the Ransom Center in November and reached an oral agreement within weeks. No other bidders were involved, he said. “The first one worked,” he said. “Texas was the first choice.”

Mailer will donate $250,000 to help cover cataloging costs, university officials said.

It will take years to fully archive the collection, which includes letters and photographs dating to the 1930s; videos and audiotapes of Mailer’s television appearances; contracts and royalty statements; and newspaper clippings documenting Mailer’s 1969 bid to become mayor of New York. Twenty-three boxes are crammed with papers related to “The Executioner’s Song,” Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book on the life and death of Utah inmate Gary Gilmore. Mailer also won the Pulitzer for “The Armies of the Night” in 1969.

In his ninth decade, Mailer has slowed down physically -- he walks with a cane in each hand and says he is going deaf -- but writes daily and is working on another book. A longtime resident of New York, he now lives in Provincetown, Mass.

Any new documents Mailer generates will eventually become part of the archive.