THE UNSEEN THEFT OF AMERICA’S LITERARY HISTORY

[Dave Monroe]

"The best that can be said for the looting of the Kenyon Review
archives by David Breithaupt was that it could have been worse. As the
nighttime supervisor of the Kenyon College library, he spent years
stealing both from the general and special collections, including some
really terrific rare books. But he did not discover until eight years
after he started working there the roughly 800 plain-looking folders
housed in beige file cabinets in the locked rare book stacks. In this
mundane tomb was housed letters, notes, and manuscripts from a who’s
who of mid-century fiction and poetry—Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn
Warren, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Bertolt Brecht, Boris
Pasternak, William Carlos Williams, E.L. Doctorow, Ford Madox Ford,
and scores of others. Predictably, this treasure-trove of unique
literary history was a boon to a man already supporting his income
with an online bookstore whose source material was the library. But
quite aside from the monetary "....

[...]

"Over the course of the months after he discovered the archive, he
went, at first, tentatively through scores of files—stealing a Pynchon
manuscript here, a Joyce Carol Oates letter there—before working his
way up to taking the complete files of the likes of W.H. Auden, Norman
Mailer, Dylan Thomas, Frank O’Connor and, of course, Flannery
O’Connor...."

http://lithub.com/the-unseen-theft-of-americas-literary-history/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l