From Same Ransom Center Newsletter--U of Texas
Richard Romeo
richardromeo at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 3 18:43:53 CDT 2001
Robert Mills Archive Arrives
The recently acquired archive of the American literary agent Robert P. Mills
(1920-1986) brings to the Ransom Center important material for research in
the literary industry of the 1960s and 1970s. The Mills agency handled a
number of the most highly regarded mystery, fantasy, and science fiction
writers active in those two decades, and his files for writers with other
interests are extensive and notable.
Among the writers represented in the firms files are Noel Langley, the
South African novelist who wrote the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz, the
film critic Pauline Kael, Leonard Feather, Isaac Asimov, Richard Brautigan,
the prolific writer of pulp fiction Norman Daniels, Naomi Mitchison, Thomas
Disch, the China expert Edgar Snow, Fritz Leiber, Langston Hughes, the
dancer Katherine Dunham, Helen McCloy, Walter Tevis, Ronald Fair, and Harlan
Ellison.
The files for three writers offer revealing hints of the richness of the
archive: a heavily revised script for James Baldwins play Blues for Mr.
Charlie, and a 1963 Baldwin letter concerning his literary idol Henry James;
seventy substantial letters from Jim Thompson, the author of disturbing
character studies in such novels as The Getaway (1959), The Grifters (1963),
and The Killer Inside Me (1953), all of which have been adapted for film;
and works by Richard Fariña. The very large files for Richard Fariña
(1937-1966), killed in a motorcycle accident two days after his only novel
was published, include manuscripts for unpublished stories and poems. The
novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, which sold two million
copies in hard and soft cover editions, was compared to the work of J.D.
Salinger and Jack Kerouac, and Fariñas friend Thomas Pynchon was at one
point going to write or collaborate on a screenplay.
John Kirkpatrick
Cline Senior Curator of Modern British Literature
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