The New York Public Library Acquires Archive of Oliver Sacks

Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

Extensive archive showcases the life and career of the most important medical humanist of the 20th century

The New York Public Library has acquired the archive of Oliver Sacks, pioneering physician and beloved author who bridged the fields of medicine, science, and the humanities. The complete archival record encompasses over 80 years worth of documents, from Sacks’s birth in 1933 until his death at 82 in 2015. It comprises 375 linear feet of papers as well as rare volumes, audiovisual material, and memorabilia. The Library purchased the collection from the Oliver Sacks Foundation; the Wylie Agency served as agent for the sale. 

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, which describe patients living with uncanny conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome, autism, and parkinsonism to musical hallucinations, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Materials of note from the archive include:

• Manuscripts for all sixteen 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 wide-ranging interests and vast intellectual curiosity, covering topics as diverse as aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming, and twins;
• Nearly 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; and
• Almost 7,000 photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, including hundreds taken by Sacks himself.

Further highlights from the archive are listed below.

“We are delighted to announce that the vast research offerings of The New York Public Library will now include the archive of Oliver Sacks, the medical humanist whose work has inspired millions of readers and continues to reverberate and inform the scientific and medical community as well as artists, scholars, and general readers to the present day,” Brent Reidy, Director of Research Libraries at The New York Public Library, said. “As a practicing physician and humanist scholar, Oliver Sacks brought a new and necessary lens to the patient–physician relationship: instead of viewing patients as the sum of their illness, he understood and treated patients as full people, with individual biographies and circumstances. His work was also responsible for bringing awareness as well as a more humane approach to a number of lesser-known neurological conditions.”

“Oliver Sacks transformed how people have come to understand the human brain and individuality—and in doing so, reshaped humanity itself,” Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, Rare Books at The New York Public Library, said. “The Sacks archive reveals his empathic approach to research and medical care, and it documents the personal experiences of countless neurodiverse patients, subjects, and friends who fueled and shaped his writing. The collection is vast in size and scope, and breathtakingly beautiful in its details. The Library is looking forward to welcoming new generations of scholars and learners to explore the remarkable personal and intellectual legacy of Oliver Sacks.”

The Oliver Sacks papers complement other archives of important figures in the study of the human mind that are housed at The New York Public Library, including William Burroughs, Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, Timothy Leary, Robert Jay Lifton, and Max Wertheimer. A prolific writer, Sacks contributed many significant essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books; and he had a long-standing working relationship with and admiration for Robert Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review of Books. The Manuscripts and Archives Division holds the institutional records of both of these publications. Finally, the archive joins a remarkable collection of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers and organizations whose papers are also held in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Additional highlights from the acquisition include:

• Over 650 handwritten notebooks and journals, as well as audio journals kept by Sacks over a span of more than sixty years, including  a handwritten journal he kept in 2000 during a visit to Mexico, which became the basis for his book Oaxaca Journal (2022);
• Numerous artworks, including drawings and paintings by patients and friends; 
• Memorabilia from his over 50-year medical career, as well as from his private life;
• Extensive correspondence with A. R. Luria, the influential Russian neuropsychologist, along with Soviet airmail envelopes;
• Correspondence with W.H. Auden, including an early draft of one poem Auden dedicated to Sacks;
• Decades of patient files, which served as the foundation of his groundbreaking research on neurological conditions and neurodiversity;
• Family correspondence and travel journals kept by Sacks during his cross-country motorcycle trips in the early 1960s
• Correspondence with and drawings by Temple Grandin, the renowned scientist and author whom Sacks profiled in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” a seminal New Yorker essay that introduced many readers to Asperger’s syndrome; and
• 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).

“The Oliver Sacks Foundation is thrilled to have Oliver Sacks’s archives, including drafts of his books and papers, his extensive correspondence with leading figures in science, medicine, and the arts find their ideal home: The New York Public Library,” Orrin Devinsky, President of the Oliver Sacks Foundation, said.

“A lifelong habitué of libraries, museums, and botanical gardens, Oliver Sacks found deep inspiration in the past,” Kate Edgar, Executive Director of the Oliver Sacks Foundation, said. “He would have been delighted to know that the materials he painstakingly collected over his long life have found a perfect home at The New York Public Library, alongside so many other treasures from diverse fields of study. The Oliver Sacks Foundation looks forward to partnering with this great institution to make the Sacks archive available to researchers, and we hope that this material will inspire others to reflect with curiosity and passion on the natural world and the place of humans within it.”

The Library has collaborated closely with the Oliver Sacks Foundation on a long-term plan to make this collection accessible to researchers while carefully controlling (and in some cases restricting) access to some parts of the collection, including patient records, to protect the privacy of Sacks’s patients, whose experiences fueled his groundbreaking research. The Library anticipates that the Oliver Sacks archive will draw new generations of researchers studying the meaning, nature, and consequences of disabilities and the experiences of neurodivergent people. It will provide researchers a richer understanding of the neurological and psychological underpinnings of human individuality, as well as the rise of the modern disability rights movement that has aimed to create a  more inclusive society.

The Library aims to open the Oliver Sacks papers to researchers by 2028.

About the Manuscripts and Archives Division

The Manuscripts and Archives Division holds over 35,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives across almost 6,000 collections. The division holds some of the Library’s greatest treasures, from illuminated manuscripts to founding documents of the United States. The strengths of the division are the papers and records of individuals, families, and organizations, particularly in greater New York City; the American Revolution; the U.S. Civil War; American literature and literary culture; the history of publishing; and LGBTQ+ history. Serving thousands of researchers every year, the division’s collections support cutting-edge research and scholarship across many disciplines.

About The New York Public Library

For over 125 years, The New York Public Library has been a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With over 90 locations—including research and branch libraries—throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars. The New York Public Library receives millions of visitors through its doors annually and millions more around the globe use its resources at www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.