| Monday - Friday | 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. |
|---|---|
| Saturday - Sunday | Closed |
Please note: the Reading Room is closed from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
To request an appointment, register for an Aeon account.
The Department of Special Collections and University Archives at McFarlin Library hosts world-class collections of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and other objects, including one of the five largest collections in the world on the celebrated Irish writer James Joyce, among many other British, Irish, and American authors.
Within our stacks are also a wide array of materials on World War I, Native American history and culture, and the Tulsa Race Massacre, along with Sherlockiana, a 1493 copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, and a piece of wallpaper taken from the box in Ford's Theatre where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
The department serves as the University Archives, collecting and caring for documents and records related to The University of Tulsa as an institution of research and higher education.
The V.S. Naipaul Life Archive came to The University of Tulsa in 1993. Naipaul himself chose Tulsa as the repository for his papers, hand delivering some and shipping additional acquisitions into the mid-2010s. Naipaul, a Trinidadian-born British author with a cultural and ethnic background stemming from India, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. The collection is truly a “Life Archive,” as it spans over seventy years of Naipaul’s personal and literary life. The repository is even more unique due to it also acting as Patricia Naipaul’s life archive, including her political manuscripts and documents from her and her family’s history, such as her birth certificate, university diploma, medical documents, and family members’ last will and testaments.
In January 2024, The University of Tulsa's Department of Special Collections was able to hire an archival processor through the Adrian Alexander Librarian-in-Residence Program on a two-year contract. Elissa Howe began the project of reprocessing the entire collection, estimated to contain over 35,000 individual objects. Among the items are pre-publication notes, drafts, manuscripts, and typescripts for most of Naipaul’s works. There are also many newspaper clippings, most of which are reviews of V.S. Naipaul’s books or articles about him, articles written by relatives or friends, and materials he used as research for his books. The collection also contains correspondence from family, friends, business partners, and readers over a span of fifty years. Additionally, there is a sizable assortment of photographs, ephemera, financial and medical documents, and even audio and video recordings of Naipaul reading from his works or speaking in interviews or lectures. Now, in July 2025, half of the collection has been reorganized with an anticipated completion date of December 2025.
Along with the reprocessing, Howe undertook designing an exhibition featuring items reflecting on and narrating his life and career. V.S. Naipaul traveled the world extensively and wrote travelogues about postcolonial societies and their struggle with culture and identity. Similarly, Naipaul used his writing to explore his own feeling of being an exile from his birth country, his cultural identity, and his new home country, sparking the exhibit title “V.S. Naipaul: Man Without a Country”. This exhibition features sixty-two items, ranging from manuscripts, photographs, awards, and ephemera, spanning over fifty years of Naipaul’s life. For the first time in over twenty years, Special Collections has also published a limited-edition run of 200 exhibition catalogues to celebrate the first time Naipaul’s materials have been shown. This exhibition is currently on display until December 19, 2025.
