Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market

The sale of authors' papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others have had on this burgeoning economy.

The market for contemporary authors' archives began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide primary sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Demand soon grew, and while writers and their families found new opportunities to make money, so too did book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. Public interest surrounding celebrity writers had exploded by the late twentieth century, and as Placing Papers illustrates, even the best funded institutions were forced to contend with the facts that acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive and increasingly competitive.

Author: Amy Hildreth Chen
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 06/30/2020
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781625344854
ISBN10: 1625344856
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American | General
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Library & Information Science | Archives & Special Libraries

About the Author
AMY HILDRETH CHEN is English and communications librarian at the University of Iowa.