We are thrilled to share the news that the New York Public Library has acquired the Oliver Sacks archive, including a vast array of annotated manuscripts, books, letters, photographs, and memorabilia that Dr. Sacks amassed over his lifetime.
This beautiful piece in the New York Times describes some of the individual items in the Sacks archive, and it quotes Julie Golia, NYPL’s associate director of archives, manuscripts and rare books, who says:
“One of the things that is really powerful to me about this collection is the role that Sacks played almost as an archivist of the experiences of people who were neurodiverse, using their words, preserving their words, listening with nuance to their wishes about how to tell their stories…. Sacks is one of the most important humanists of the 20th and 21st century.”
Sacks in London in 1958. As a young man, he was an avid powerlifter, and in 1961 set a California state record with a 600-pound back squat. Oliver Sacks Foundation via The New York Times
“The Oliver Sacks Foundation is thrilled to have Oliver Sacks’s archives, including drafts of his books and papers, his extensive correspondence with leading figures in science, medicine, and the arts find their ideal home: The New York Public Library.” — Orrin Devinsky, President of the Oliver Sacks Foundation
Notes on patients with encephalitis lethargica, which Sacks wrote about in his book “Awakenings.” Oliver Sacks Foundation
Also in the Sacks archive:
- Hundreds of handwritten notebooks and journals, as well as audio journals kept by Sacks over a span of more than sixty years
- Handwritten and typed manuscripts for all 16 books and every major article and essay written by Sacks, accompanied by drafts, notes, revisions, proofs, and galleys
- Research and subject files reflecting Sacks’s wide-ranging interests and vast intellectual curiosity, covering topics as diverse as aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming, and twins
- Nearly 35,000 letters exchanged with friends, family, patients, colleagues, and fans, including W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter, Robert Silvers, and Susan Sontag
- Thousands of photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, including hundreds taken by Sacks himself.
A page of notes titled “Motorbikes,” made while writing his 2015 memoir “On the Move,” which opens with his childhood longing for “ease of movement and superhuman power.” Oliver Sacks Foundation
It’s a giant collection and will take several years to catalog and process; the library plans to open the Oliver Sacks papers to researchers by 2028. But you can read the best of Dr. Sacks’s correspondence in a short few weeks, with the publication of LETTERS, a selection of correspondence curated by Kate Edgar that illuminates his deepest thoughts on music, art, and science, friendship and resilience, and what it takes to lead a meaningful life.
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