If novelist Paul Mark Scott (1920-1978) has secured a niche in
English literature, it is on the merits of his Raj Quartet and its
sequel, Staying On, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1977. Yet
by the time he had published The Jewel in the Crown in 1966, he had
supported his family on his writing for six years, worked as a
literary advisor for several publishers, routinely written book
reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and
Country Life, and published eight novels. Scott's literary
reputation was already considerable when, at the age of 44, he
embarked on The Raj Quartet that would take up the last fourteen
years of his life-a masterpiece that reinterpreted the major events
of his generation and challenged his contemporaries to face the
legacy of their past. Beginning in 1964, Scott negotiated with the
Harry Ransom Research Center at The University of Texas-Austin for
the purchase of his manuscripts. Later, when he was teaching
creative writing at the University of Tulsa in 1976, he arranged to
sell his letters to the archives at McFarlin Library. Many years
after his death, David Higham Associates (the literary agency for
which Scott worked from 1950-1960 and which acted as Scott's own
agent until his death in 1978) sold archival materials to the Harry
Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin. Only a limited amount of
material from McFarlin's Paul Scott Collection has been published
to date. The David Higham Collection has not been systematically
used until now. Together, the Tulsa and Austin Collections involve
many thousands of Scott's professional and personal letters, to a
large degree untapped by scholars of literature. In this two-volume
collection, Janis Haswell makes available to the reading public for
the first time several hundred letters from the Tulsa and Austin
archives, as well as dozens of private letters to daughters Carol
and Sally Scott. Scott's letters never disappoint. They are
intriguing, well-penned and (in most cases) well-preserved in
carbon form by Scott himself. They explore in depth and detail
available nowhere else his view of the themes and structure of his
novels; his experience and views of India; his dealings with
publishers, agents, critics, readers, and writer friends (the likes
of Muriel Spark, Gabriel Fielding, M. M. Kaye); his role as an
agent and influential reviewer of fiction; his trials in supporting
himself and family as a freelancer; his experience as a teacher in
the United States; and his love and loyalty to family and friends.
General
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