Writers are different from the rest of us. Their castoff scraps can be worth money, not to mention the obsessive attentions of future scholars.

Jonathan Lethem, 52, recently became the latest author to sell his personal paper trail to a major archive. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired a trove of his manuscripts, letters, notes and other artifacts, which will now sit alongside material from Walt Whitman, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson in its rich American literature collection.

Mr. Lethem’s papers contain items relating to the novels that made him something of a reluctant patron saint of Brooklyn’s literary ascendance, including “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999) and “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003). But as befits a lifelong collector, music obsessive, comics geek and dedicated chronicler of underground culture, there are also hand-drawn cartoons, New York 1970s ephemera and what is surely the largest cache of drawings of vomiting cats in any university collection.

“For an author who is so much fun as a novelist, it’s interesting to see there is so much fun in his archival documents as well,” said Melissa Barton, the curator of American prose and drama at the Beinecke. (Ms. Barton, citing library policy, declined to say what Yale paid in the sale, which was arranged by the Manhattan book dealer Glenn Horowitz.)