The Burroughs Archive

The Burroughs archive contains 11,000 pages of manuscript and typescript material, including draft versions and notes for virtually all of Burroughs's works through 1972, said Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection. Most of the material in the archive from the 1960's and 70's has never been seen, except by Burroughs and his contemporaries.

In addition, the archive includes typescripts and manuscripts for numerous unpublished works, which Burroughs organized by date or subject matter or whim into numbered folios, or folders; some 3,000 pages of highly personal literary and artistic correspondence, collages, dream calendars, diaries, notebooks, more than 50 hours of unreleased tape recordings and hundreds of photographs by and of Burroughs, who died in 1997.

"This archive has really achieved legendary status among people who follow the Beat writers," Mr. Gewirtz said in an interview in the stately reading room that serves as home to the Berg Collection at the library's landmark building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

"Of the tens of thousands of pages, only literally a handful have ever been seen, and only a very few quoted from," he said.

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