John Lane's Literary Papers Acquired by Texas Tech

 John Lane standing with his 1200 pounds of paper bound for Texas!

This morning I've been thinking about how last May my literary archives went to Texas. All my papers (letters to and from me, journals, notebooks, drafts and fragment of work both published and unpublished, contracts, bank statements, phone bills, you name it) had lived with me for over 30 years, and it was sad to see them all go, though Betsy was excited to have the boxes out of the basement.

It's been strange since all that left not to be able to go into our basement and sort through some paper part of my life long-past. Now it's as if a part of me is gone to live in Texas, and I'd have to go there to visit it.

"GTT," is written across the top of many of the deeds from piedmont SC land. "Gone to Texas." This is what happened around here when the land was farmed out. People simply abandoned their farms and moved west. Mostly it happened in the 1830s and 1840s. Now 100 years later I can write "GTT" across the top of a part of my literary life.

But fear not, I tell myself. I am a packrat and there are already new boxes in the basement with new letters, drafts, contracts, bank statements. Maybe in 10 years I'll send another pallet of paper out there to join what's already there. By the end of this literary life I'll be entirely "GTT."

Here's how the Texas Tech website describes the purchase:

The Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library (SWC/SCL) has acquired the literary papers of Southern author John Lane.

The archive, part of the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, will include manuscripts, journals, book drafts, personal memorabilia, photographs and hundreds of letters from leading contemporary literary figures such as former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall and fellow Sowell Collection writers Barry Lopez and Rick Bass.

It should be cataloged and available to researchers in 2009.

"John Lane's papers provide rich connections to the literature of the American South," said SWC/SCL deputy director William Tydeman.

"His books transcend any narrow definitions of regionalism, and these materials help affirm the importance of the Sowell Collection in the scholarship of writing specific to place."