The illustrious literary periodical’s archive includes correspondence from writers including Susan Sontag and Oliver Sacks as well as rejected work

The New York Public Library has acquired the archives of the New York Review of Books, the library’s board of trustees announced on Tuesday.



The acquisition will bring about 3,000 linear feet of manuscript material to the library’s manuscripts and archives division, a “significant addition to the Library’s collections, already rich with materials documenting the political, cultural and intellectual history of New York City”, the library said in an announcement. Funds for the purchase were donated by Roger Alcaly, a hedge fund manager and writer, and his wife, the photographer Helen Bodian.



The archive includes correspondence between the influential literary magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, who founded the Review in 1963, and its many contributing writers, including Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Noam Chomsky and Oliver Sacks.



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The correspondence “provides unique evidence of intellectual life in the United States in the second half of the 20th century” along with details of the “lively literary disputes that have long given the magazine its character of intensity and passion for factual correctness”, according to the announcement.



Among the details are typescripts from Sontag of her many essays on photography. In one letter, she writes to Silvers: “I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into: writing about photography is like writing about the world.”



The archive also includes unpublished material that was rejected by the magazine from writers like Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer and Norman Mailer, and unsuccessful attempts by editors of the Review to solicit work from writers.



For example, when editors asked Saul Bellow to write a piece on the death of Primo Levi, the writer responded: “While I’m not exactly King Lear, I’ve had more than the normal share of family trouble in the past months ... I can’t find it in me just now to write on so distressing a subject ... Things have been singularly nasty lately.”

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“Since its founding in 1963, the Review has kept its home in New York City and over the years has unfailingly reflected the city’s cosmopolitan spirit,” Alcaly and Bodian said in a statement. “We are pleased that the archive will be housed in a great public library, open to everyone, and yet remain in the city of its origins where the Review continues to publish.”

The archival material will take up to three years to process and be made fully available to researchers.

