Readers, Writers, and Editors

Detail of first page of an early draft of Roots

Fulton Oursler, Jr. (C'54), longtime Library Associate and Library Advisory Council member, has presented an extraordinary collection of modern literary material. The archive reveals much about the affairs of Reader's Digest and Mr. Oursler's role as its book editor. Among the correspondents are Neil Armstrong, Ray Bradbury, Will Durant, Billy Graham, John Hersey, Eric Hoffer, Charles A. Lindbergh, Cornelius Ryan, Carl Sagan, Leon Uris, and Barbara Ward. There are original typescripts, with manuscript corrections, by Theodore H. White, Warren E. Burger, and Arthur Ashe, all on the subject of "What America Means to Me." Letters and manuscripts by James A. Michener abound, especially regarding his book on South Africa, The Covenant, which he wrote at the Digest's suggestion.

Oursler was also the editor of Alex Haley, and the archive includes important material about Roots. In a six page letter of July 29, 1969, Haley discusses the book. He was concerned that the first chapter of his magnum opus was 200 pages long and asks guidance of Oursler. Haley then describes what he expects Roots to be:

I'll tell you what it is; it is one of the most powerful books of our time. It is the book that is going to do, in this present social problem we have, something comparable, I hear, here and there (when I have dscribed the book in some detail to persons equipped with knowledge to discern such), to what Uncle Tom's Cabin did in another time . . .

In another letter, dated June 17, 1976, he reminisces about the book's origin and his indebtedness to Reader's Digest:

I'm sure a hundred times my thoughts have flashed back gratefully to that day in 1966 when at Mrs. Wallace's request, there in the Guest House a dining table of you editors gave me sympathetic ears as I just poured out my passionate want to try and cross that ocean, genealogically-speaking, exploring the very few, very slender phonetic clues that I felt I had within a story that my Grandma had drilled into me in my boyhood. And you collectively agreed upon an editorial sheer gamble to help me . . .

In previous years Mr. Oursler donated to the library the papers of his distinguished father, also an editor at Reader's Digest and the author of The Greatest Story Ever Told. The two archives constitute a wonderful record of part of the American literary scene for almost the whole of the century, and they also form an institutional history of Reader's Digest, one of the nation's most successful publishing ventures.