New York Public Library Acquires Archive of Oliver Sacks

The NYPL has acquired the archive of Oliver Sacks which showcases the life and career of the author and perhaps most important medical humanist of the 20th century. 

The complete archival record encompasses over 80 years worth of documents, from Sacks’s birth in 1933 until his death at 82 in 2015, made up of 375 linear feet of papers as well as rare volumes, audiovisual material, and memorabilia. The Library purchased the collection from the Oliver Sacks Foundation.

Sacks is best known for his compassionate explorations of the far borderlands of neurological experience, in essays and books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. Highlights from the archive include:

• manuscripts for all 16 books and every major article and essay written by Sacks, accompanied by drafts, notes, revisions, proofs, and galleys
• drafts and notes for more than 400 speeches and lectures given by Sacks
• research and subject files reflecting Sacks’s wideranging interests and covering topics as diverse as aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming, and twins
• around 35,000 letters exchanged with friends, family, patients, colleagues, and acquaintances, including W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter, Robert Silvers, and Susan Sontag
• nearly 7,000 photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, including hundreds taken by Sacks himself 
• more than 650 handwritten notebooks and journals, as well as audio journals kept by Sacks over a span of more than 60 years, including a handwritten journal he kept in 2000 during a visit to Mexico, which became the basis for his book Oaxaca Journal (2022)
• family correspondence and travel journals kept by Sacks during his cross-country motorcycle trips in the early 1960s
• colorful handwritten notes and manuscript drafts of Sacks’ most famous books, including Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (1985).