ARCHIVISTICA Y LITERATURA

Syracuse, NY – The family of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Safire has put more of his personal papers, including correspondence with Bill Clinton, Norman Mailer and other notables, on deposit at Syracuse University.

Now, university archivists are going to use an $86,000 grant to organize the materials.
Safire’s family deposited the papers with SU in 2010, the year after Safire’s death from pancreatic cancer.

The arrangement is not a donation but a five-year loan, said Sean Quimby, director of special collections at the Syracuse University Library. SU officials hope they can negotiate with Safire’s estate to make it permanent when the donation agreement expires, he said.

In addition to the deposit of papers, Safire’s estate donated nearly 1,700 volumes from the author’s book collection to the university. Some of the books are rare, for example, a 1663 edition of Nicolas Caussin’s “The Holy Court in Five Tomes” is among them.

The books and papers together take up almost 200 feet of shelf space, Quimby said.

They join materials that Safire donated to the university between 1994 and 1998. Those items are housed at the Safire Room on the sixth floor of SU’s Bird Library.

The new items are housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Bird. Researchers can request access to them, but Safire’s family must give its permission before access is granted.
Safire attended SU in the late 1940s and was a member of its board of trustees. He was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon before becoming a conservative political columnist for The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978. He also wrote “On Language,” a weekly column devoted the origin and use of words and phrases. More on Safire's life.

The deposited items came with an inventory, so officials have a general idea of what is in them, Quimby said. The papers are known to include correspondence with readers, research notes and annotations to the things he read. Scrapbooks and videos of lectures are among them, too.
“The correspondence list is lengthy,” Quimby said. “Joe Biden is on there. Henry Kissinger. And there’s an interesting mix of popular authors -- Ray Bradbury is listed.”

The grant from the Dana Foundation will let the library hire a full-time archivist to arrange and describe the collection. The archivist also is expected to create an online finding tool and choose 500 items to be put in digital format and made available on the library’s Web site.

The foundation, which supports brain research, was chaired by Safire from 2000 until his death.
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