Collection includes discarded opening chapter for The Remains of the Day, as well as extensive notes and multiple drafts of the writer’s works

The archives of the award-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, including a discarded opening chapter for his best-known book, The Remains of the Day, have been bought by the University of Texas. The novelist, who was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and has lived in Britain since he was a child, has kept extensive notes and multiple drafts of his works, which include Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant.

The collection will be held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, a research library that is a major collector of manuscripts and original source material. The university paid just over $1m (£635,000) to acquire the material, a library spokeswoman said.

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Ishiguro said in a statement released by the university: “For many years, I’ve been in the habit of keeping a large cardboard box under my desk into which I throw, more or less indiscriminately, all papers produced during my writing that I don’t want to file neatly and take into the next stage of composition.” These include early drafts of chapters, rejected pages, scraps of paper with scribbled thoughts, and repeated attempts at the same paragraph, he added.

Also in the collection will be unpublished works and notes for stories, screenplays and songs, including a track called Shingles written by a young Ishiguro, who tried to land a contract with a major record label.

In preparing to ship his archives to Austin, Ishiguro found a manuscript for a pulp western he thought had been lost – his first serious attempt at fiction. There is also a short novel that followed, called To Remember a Summer By. At least one publisher rejected it.

Ishiguro began to gain notice in the 1980s for works such as A Pale View of the Hills, but global fame came with The Remains of the Day, the story of a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain. The novel won him the Man Booker prize and was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

In the 1990s, a friend told Ishiguro to keep an archive of his notes. “This struck me as extreme, but from then on, instead of giving the contents of the cardboard box to the refuse collectors, I began emptying them in plastic crates and storing them in the attic,” Ishiguro said.