Correspondence, Early Book Drafts, Notebooks, Sketches for The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain and Other Works Now Available to Researchers in The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature“I am, of course, very pleased that my notes, manuscript, sketches, letters and photographs have gone to the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library,” said Ms. Proulx. “What writer would not be honored to be in the company of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Thoreau, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolfe, Marianne Moore, Paul Auster and W. H. Auden? To me there is an odd sense of balance that material dealing with some of the most rural landscapes in North America will reside in our major city. Aside from the pages directly related to my writing, the letters, emails, financial reports to and from agents, publishers, editors and translators may be useful to future historians and scholars examining this period in American publishing and literature. We are currently undergoing major changes in the way we regard intellectual property and literary work; some of anxieties of that metamorphosis are reflected in my archive.”
The collection includes an early notebook (1987-89) of draft ideas for Proulx’s first novel, Postcards, which won a Pen-Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her most famous novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News, is represented by 3,662 pages of typescript, many with holograph revision and correction, along with screenplay adaptation pages and correspondence. A 1993 typescript bears heavy holograph revisions in purple ink. Early drafts (1994) of the novel Accordion Crimes total about 1,000 pages.
A notebook containing original manuscript ideas for Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” is included in the collection, along with 21 typescripts under a variety of working titles including “Bulldust Mountain,” “Whiskey Mountain,” and “Swill-Swallow Mountain.” Three corrected typescript drafts of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay adaption of the story are included, along with legal documentation and clippings.
http://www.nypl.org/press/releases/?article_id=353
