Our £250,000 grant is supporting the Bodleian to secure the Raymond Chandler archive. This will enable continued cataloguing of the collection and continued public engagement through exhibitions, activities and digital engagement.
Raymond Chandler (1888 –1959) was a notable 20th century British-American author and screenwriter, with enormous popular and scholarly appeal. His novels have been translated into 25 languages and have had a notable impact on British literary culture. His archive is of outstanding cultural and artistic value because of the insights it provides into Chandler’s writing process, personal beliefs and business practices.
The collection contains papers held by Chandler’s British literary agent Helga Greene and his American literary agents Brandt and Brandt. It includes two of Chandler’s working notebooks, drafts of his works, discarded film scripts, book pages and letters.
It also includes a complete set of business correspondence with Greene that illustrates the business of being an internationally successful writer in the mid-20th century, and some personal letters to her (she was briefly his fiancée) as well as other close personal correspondence. The archive has been housed at the Bodleian Libraries since 1983 but was being sold by its owner, and was at risk of sale into private ownership, as well as of dispersal and degradation of condition.