Posted March 3, 2006.

New York Public Library Acquires Burroughs Archive

The New York Public Library has purchased a voluminous archive of manuscript and typescript material assembled by avant-garde American novelist William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). The collection contains Burroughs’s correspondence from the early 1950s to the early 1970s and includes draft versions of Naked Lunch, published in 1959. The archive joins manuscript collections of Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso in NYPL’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

“Not only was Burroughs one of the three progenitors of the Beat movement and an avant-garde writer who influenced and was influenced by such movements as Surrealism, Fluxus, British ’New Wave’ Science Fiction, the Post-Beat, and Concrete Poetry,” said Berg Collection Curator Isaac Gewirtz, “but he may also be regarded as one of 20th-century America’s great satirists, fiercely sinister and corrosive.”

The archive was originally organized in 1972 by Burroughs and his occasional collaborator, Swiss-Canadian painter Brion Gysin. It was cataloged by Beat historian Barry Miles and originally sold to Roberto Altmann of Liechtenstein. NYPL acquired the collection from book collectors Robert H. and Donna L. Jackson of Shaker Heights, Ohio, for an undisclosed amount.

“This archive has really achieved legendary status among people who follow the Beat writers,” Gewirtz said in the March 1 New York Times. “Of the tens of thousands of pages, only literally a handful have ever been seen, and only a very few quoted from.”

Posted March 3, 2006.