Tom Wolfe Cleans House
Writer Tom Wolfe will have a lot more room in his home library, now that 1951 graduate of Washington and Lee is moving 190 boxes of his papers to the New York Public Library.
The library’s acquisition of “drafts, outlines and research materials for his four novels and 12 other books as well as his uncollected journalism” will enrich the work of scholars when the collection is ready for their explorations next year.
As one of the library officials told the New York Times in the article about the acquisition, the collection “will allow research not just into Wolfe as an innovator in style and methodology, but also into the things he did research into. He had access that people will never have again.”
The boxes making their way from home to library contain over 10,000 letters to correspondents such as William F. Buckley and Hunter S. Thompson.
“The archive also contains something that future writers will be producing less of,” says the article, “book drafts composed on a typewriter or by hand.”
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