Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Didion and Dunne’s joint personal literary archives. On Thursday, the library’s board approved the purchase of a trove of letters, photographs, manuscripts, family records and other material that traces the individual and collaborative work of one of postwar America’s most productive and glamorous literary couples.
The archive, which totals 240 linear feet of material, spans the whole of Didion’s life, starting with her birth in Sacramento in 1934 (represented by a hospital record showing her mother’s thumbprint, along with the footprint of a just-born baby Joan).
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The manuscripts for Didion’s first nine books, from the novel “Run River” (1963) to the essay collection “After Henry” (1992), were already at the University of California, Berkeley, where Didion placed them after she and Dunne moved to New York City in 1988.
But when [Julia] Golia [NYPL associate director of manuscripts, archives and rare books] and [Declan] Kiely [NYPL director of special collections and exhibitions] made the first of three visits to the storage facility where the rest of Didion and Dunne’s papers were kept, they were floored by the depth and volume of the collection, and by how personal much of the material was.
“Our jaws were just hanging open,” Kiely said.
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Kiely said the papers should be processed by early 2025, at which point the collection will be open without any restrictions to scholars, biographers, and (like virtually all of its holdings) anyone else with a library card.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
