The Papers

Man, Tom, this isn’t how I’d do it.

That’s what I was thinking the other day as I was going through Tom Wolfe’s papers at the New York Public Library, now trying to match up precisely where I’d gotten material, for the book’s endnotes.

And I was thinking specifically not of the folders of research files or manuscripts, which are clear enough, but of the collection’s 66 boxes of correspondence. I’ve mentioned what’s in them before, a number of times, but here I want to say a word about their presentation.

I probably had to go through them twice just to figure out the cast of characters and their relative importance. Some, of course, I knew on sight: Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Jann Wenner. I learned who others were: sources like Kailey Wong and O.W. Van Petten, colleagues like Larry Dietz. Then there’s everyone else, including friends and family, the groupie, the semi-groupie, socialites.

What threw me was the organization, or lack thereof. Everything is sorted, more or less, by year, rather than by name or topic, which would have made the most sense to me. I even asked the library about it, and Meredith Mann, who is the Interim Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts, e-mailed me: ``When an archive is organized a certain way by its creator, our approach is to maintain that original order. For Wolfe’s papers, the correspondence came to the Library from Wolfe with this chronological arrangement.’’

The arrangement isn’t perfect. There’s a lot of bleed between boxes, and years. There’ll be a typed draft of a letter, with corrections and additions and subtractions by hand, and a couple of folders away, a revised version, and sometimes a near-final version in a folder in a previous box. So I’ve had to piece together the progress of a letter, or a story, or an idea. Perhaps the most satisfying of the puzzles contained in the boxes was the story of Sherman McCoy’s makeover from writer to bond salesman (see the Oct. 20, 2025 installment, ``Bonfire.’’ )

But it wasn’t easy. You have to ``turn every page,’’ as Robert Caro said of the Lyndon B. Johnson papers, and then you also have to say, ``Wait a minute.’’

Of course, as I’m reorganizing Tom’s papers in my own mind, I’m also advising him on what to jettison. At least 25%, and perhaps more, of the papers could go, with no diminution to Tom’s reputation or legacy or the future of Wolfe studies.

I’m sure this chronological organization is saying something profound. I just can’t quite yet figure out what it is.