Crossing continents | 12 March 2008

Perhaps it’s greed. Or is it greed laced with betrayal? Certainly it’s unseemly. As their careers draw to a close, British authors have developed a habit of stuffing their collected notebooks into a rucksack, hopping to America on Virgin and flogging their life’s jottings to the highest bidder. In 2006 Salman Rushdie accepted an undisclosed sum from Emory University in Atlanta for a collection of papers said to include two unpublished novels and the ‘Fatwa Diaries’ written during his decade on the run from Islamic executioners. The same university handed over $600,000 for a collection of Ted Hughes’s papers in 2003. The University of Texas has done deals with Arnold Wesker and Julian Barnes, the latter reportedly for $200,000. And David Hare is the latest to come to a lucrative arrangement with an American institute of education.

Back in the 1990s, after the death of Graham Greene, the competition for the archives of prestigious British authors began to get serious.