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HeвЂ™s lined the walls of his office with photos of вЂњhisвЂќ authors-writers like Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo. Staley is an English professor (like the centerвЂ™s founder), as well as a Joyce scholar. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His first major acquisitions included manuscripts by the newly canonized modernists D. The idea that the Ransom Center would place its institutional thumb on the scales of history traces back to 1956, when Harry Huntt Ransom, a dean at the University of Texas, called for a library both вЂњhistoric and prophetic,вЂќ to conserve the past and shape the future. For what itвЂ™s worth, Graff adds, the strategy is вЂњvery Texas, very competitive.вЂќ

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Gerald Graff, a former president of the Modern Language Association-the principal professional organization for scholars of English and other modern languages-calls this вЂњan interesting switch from tradition, when authors had the decency to die first and then their reputation got to be determined.вЂќ Now a library with an interest in what history decides is jumping the gun. The center is out to play a role in literary-canon formation, the Ransom CenterвЂ™s director, Thomas Staley, told me during my recent visit. Something else happens when the scribblings of a living artist are placed alongside those of the greats. The congratulatory letters that Johnson received after writing Tree of Smoke, or the note he wrote to his family about playing guitar-these may seem mundane now, but the Ransom Center is betting that the novelist just might become the next Hawthorne or Hemingway (whose papers it already has), or maybe the next David Foster Wallace (whose papers it recently scored).Д«ut the library is engaged in more than just speculation. ItвЂ™s also scooping up material belonging to authors like Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Julian Barnes, and Steve Martin (yes, that one). Coetzee-spending $1.5 million on more than 160 boxes containing drafts, notebooks, and letters, among other things. This fall, the center locked down the papers of the living Nobel laureate J. Instead, the library is pursuing the private papers of contemporary authors. The Ransom Center is on a buying binge, but not with the long-dead titans of literature in mind. The requisite Gutenberg Bible is on display, along with treasures rarer still: Shakespeare folios James Joyce manuscripts the archives of Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Sexton, George Bernard Shaw. With 36 million manuscripts and a million rare books, the Harry Ransom Center, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is a standout in the exclusive club of the worldвЂ™s great museum-quality collections.

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A Ransom Center staffer in the archive of Norman Mailer, who earmarked his papers for the library before he died, in 2007 (Harry Cabluck/Associated Press)

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