Harry Ransom Center

The humanities research library and archive of the University of Texas at Austin, and the principal repository of the Norman Mailer Papers — Mailer's manuscripts, correspondence, and a large part of his personal library, acquired in 2005. It is the most frequently cited `manuscript-location` in this register.

The Harry Ransom Center (founded 1957) is the rare-books, manuscript, and archive library of the University of Texas at Austin. Mailer’s archive went to the Ransom Center in 2005 — including, as J. Michael Lennon notes in “The Naked and the Read,” “about 1,200 reference books and numerous foreign editions of his forty-odd published books” alongside the manuscripts and correspondence. The collection is catalogued as the Norman Mailer Papers.

For this project the Ransom Center is the standing answer to the manuscript-location field: surviving typescripts and drafts are held there. An early instance is the Harvard Advocate story “Maybe Next Year” (1942), whose paginated typescript — bearing an archivist’s note on its discarded working title “Horror Tale: outmoded” — survives in the Norman Mailer Papers. Mailer’s papers went to Texas rather than to Harvard, his alma mater. A fuller, separately sourced account of the acquisition and the collection’s scope is a backlog item.

Related pages

• The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer | Maybe Next Year | Harvard University | Norman Mailer Center | About this project

Cite as: /organizations/harry-ransom-center
Last updated: 2026-05-24