Emory University to Acquire Alice Walker Archive

by Staff
12.19.07

Emory University announced recently that after ten years of negotiations it has reached a deal with Alice Walker to acquire the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's papers. The archive includes journals and manuscripts dating to Walker’s teenage years in the 1950s and correspondence with eminent feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Tillie Olsen, among other artists and public figures. Walker said that Emory, located in the author’s native Georgia, is "a place where my archive can rest with joy in the company it keeps," the Associated Press reported.

Rudolph Byrd, professor of American studies at Emory, said that Walker’s papers "give you a sense of the process for creating fiction and for creating poetry," the New York Times reported. "Everything she’s ever written, she has a record of." According to Steve Ennis, director of Emory’s manuscript, archives, and rare books library, the papers will be available for viewing in about a year.

In other archive news, the papers of the late Norman Mailer, which are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, will be opened to the public on January 3. The archive is comprised of a thousand boxes of typed and handwritten manuscripts, galley proofs, correspondence, photographs, audiotapes and videotapes, and other materials dated from the 1930s to 2005. The Ransom Center will later incorporate into the archive papers dating from 2005 to the author’s death on November 10.