The Things They Carried Back To Austin

Score one more for the acquisitions team at the Harry Ransom Center. Yesterday morning, the UT facility announced that it had purchased the papers of Tim O'Brien, American novelist and resident of Central Texas. O'Brien teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Highlights include O'Brien's manuscripts, correspondence (including letters home from Vietnam), military uniforms and awards, and an annotated map of Vietnam. The collection fits in 25 boxes, which will find a happy home in the HRC vault alongside Beckett, Mailer, DeLillo, Hemingway, and various other contemporaries and influences. As probably the most celebrated novelist of the Vietnam War, O'Brien's archive adds substantially to the HRC's already impressive collection of war literature. No word yet on how much the Center paid, but we doubt it topped the $2.5 million shelled out for Normal Mailer's archive in 2005. The HRC's archives are open to the public, an extraordinary service to residents of Austin.

We'll be especially eager to see the Vietnam-era letters. As anyone who has ever seen O'Brien read knows, the guy is a master of weaving heartwrenching stories from personal experience. These materials will shed new light on where personal experience ends and literature begins.