The University of Tulsa
McFarlin Library, Special Collections Department

The V. S. Naipaul Archive

Guide to the V. S. Naipaul Archive

Acquiring the V. S. Naipaul Archive
     In 1993, The University of Tulsa acquired the archive of twentieth-century citizen of the world V. S. Naipaul, which contains at present all his manuscripts, correspondence, and memorabilia and is destined to encompass as well all that he has yet to write.  Such treasures bring visitors from near and far to the University to gain the knowledge and understanding that can only come from direct encounter with unique, original manuscripts that embody high genius, both historic and creative.  Currently, the Archive contains more than 50,000 pieces, including manuscripts, correspondence and family memorabilia.

    At the official opening ceremony for his Archives at the University of Tulsa on March 22, 1994,, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul spoke about the personal and literary  importance of archives. 

    When I was six or seven I came across my father's records.  They were in a bulky bookcase-bureau - three or four glass-fronted bookshelves, and below that a desk top with a sloping lid - the whole big thing roughly carpentered from box boards.  . . .My father would have been about thirty-one or thirty-two, and his records were mainly letters and lessons from a London journalism-by-correspondence school; articles he had written, the local magazines in which his work had appeared; two scrapbooks of his journalism from seven or eight years before; various versions of the few stories he had written; and some copies of American and English magazines - Grand, Strand, Cosmopolitan - for which in his innocence he hoped to write.
       I was entranced by this material.  I went back to that desk again and again, in spite of the mice that sometimes had somehow got in to nest among the papers, and in spite of the cockroaches and the oddly named silver fish.  To lift the sloping lid of that desk was to get an idea of romance:  the romance of my father's life, the lives of the people he wrote about, the romance of a great world outside with which letters might be exchanged.  That idea of the romance of human life, past and present, was never to leave me.  It was my grounding as a writer.  It has rippled ever outwards.  I am still at the margin
    So it will be understood how strong my wish was, when my own time came, to preserve my own records, to create my own version of the bureau-bookshelves.  And it is my hope that in these papers of mine - though of course in infinitely more salubrious conditions than my father's, and well stowed away from boilers - others may find something of the romance which has sustained me in my writing life.
    The papers, as I have said, now have their cultural and historical side.  They also have their biographical side.  The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped.  It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer's life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating - of a cultural or historical moment - than the writer's books.  But in the assessment of a writer's work no among of biographical inquiry can "exempt us from the pilgrimage of the heart".

Sidney Huttner, Curator of Special Collections at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library from 1984 - 1998 learned of Naipaul's interest in finding a permanent home for his papers in 1992.  "We wrote to his agent and said we'd be happy to consider it," said Mr. Huttner.  "Nothing happened for about six months , then his agent  spent two days here talking with us."   The size of Tulsa's program appealed to Naipaul, according to Colin Franklin, the English bookseller who helped to arrange the sale of the archives. "He wanted a place where he could go and work with his papers."

Images from the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Author V. S. Naipaul, Dr. George Gilpin, Professor of English, and James O. Goodwin, University of Tulsa Trustee at the opening of the Archive.	Author V. S. Naipaul and Irish poet Richard Murphy, a former Distinguished Visiting Professor in English at TU	The late Katie Westby, a long time friend and supporter of the University and former Curator of Special Collections Sid Huttner at the reception.

About Special Collections at the University of Tulsa

The Naipaul Archive builds on already strong holdings of Anglo-Irish and American literature from the first half of this century and provides a focus collection on Commonwealth literature in English after 1950 of which V. S. Naipaul is a premier writer.

In addition, TU's Special Collections contains one of the world's most extensive collections of James Joyce materials, including first editions of all of Joyce's works.  The department includes over 120,000 volumes  of manuscripts of late 19th and 20th century English, Irish and American literature, including strong collections of T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman.

Over 4,000 feet of manuscripts collections include the papers of Cyril Connolly, Richard Murphy, Jean Rhys, Paul Scott, Stevie Smith, William Trevor and Rebecca West, and the archive of Andre Deutsch Ltd., London publisher of Naipaul's early books.

For more information about Special Collections at the University of Tulsa, please visit our  website.