I did my undergrad at Texas State, and I kick myself, often, for having failed to capitalize on the opportunity to use our library’s archival collection of Cormac McCarthy’s papers. At the time, I had only a passing interest in McCarthy and had read one or two of his books. Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men. A professor in one of my English courses even offered to take anyone interested to the archive, and I thought at the time, “Wat would be the point in that?”

That was before I spent years poring over the vast majority of McCarthy’s bibliography and before I became obsessed with the ways in which he manufactures the sentence. I did not understand then the wealth of information I had at my disposal. As Bode and Osborne say in The History of the Book, the viewing of these archives of correspondence provide the opportunity to better understand authorial intention and “destabilize established arguments by directing attention to new information” (221). Right now, those very same archives are being scoured for any new information about McCarthy’s much younger muse and their very eyebrow-raising love affair. Destabilization is the key to the creation of greater understanding.

Research of this depth can give the researcher the opportunity to better understand the author and to also upend the status quo surrounding their work. Take, for example, the case of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which existed in its final form only after the dedicated work of archival researchers unearthed new material, with part 2 of the novel appearing seventeen years after Wright’s death and a complete edition finally being published fourteen years after that, in 1991 (Cloutier 1-2). The status quo around Wright’s work was to shun it, but to resist that through research has allowed us the opportunity to create a new narrative around the author and his work.

I do wonder at the future of archival research, and how it might change, in some ways for the better, as a digital archive of writers’ correspondence would be much easier to navigate, but this ease of navigation might lead to less discovery, as we may only find what we are looking for and lose the opportunity for surprise that would disrupt that status quo. When information must be combed through, that is the only time you really get the chance to uncover what many may have tried to keep hidden.