Reprint from Collections & Connections
Fall 1997, Vol.2, No. 1

Jim and I came to Western directly from Vanderbilt Graduat School in 1963. We were in our mid-20s, parents of two young boys, the oldest not yet two. It never occurred to either of us that we had chosen home base for our entire working lives and the growing-up lives of our three children (our daughter was born in 1967).

Jim came home one day that very first semester, both pleased and amused: Julia Neal, then Director of the Kentucky Library and Museum, had asked him to donate his papers to the Kentucky Library! "My papers," he kept saying, "my papers." As academics we knew what "papers" meant, but at the time, Jim had only on little volume of poems, COPPERHEAD CANE, published by a small press in Nashville. True, it had attracted some serious attention, most notably from Maxine Cumin, who featured it in her column in THE WRITER, but at twenty-six Jim was having trouble absorbing the news that someone wanted him to promise his literary leaving to a library. "My papers! My papers!"

It was a promise, never formalized, never legally binding but one that Jim never regretted. Through the years he had the opportunity to see how the staff at Western's Kentucky Library, especially the Manuscripts, journals, and letters and was forever telling me that if he wanted to locate something of his, he just called Pat Hodges.

Other schools, many schools in fact, have approached me about Jim's papers, but I know where he wanted them to be. Like me, he worried sometimes that the staff was overworked, that the Kentucky Building, however lovely, desperately needed expansion, but he trusted those splendid professionals to go far beyond the call of duty, just as Mrs. Robert Penn Warren trusted them when she gave her husband's personal library to Western. She told me shortly before she died that Western had done for Warren's books what Yale had failed to do for his papers. That's why Warren's books are here.

That (along with his promise to Julia) is why Jim's papers are here too.

~Mary Ellen Miller