The George V. Higgins Archive includes Higgins' literary, personal and legal papers from his remarkable career: from his writings for the Boston College literary magazine, "The Stylus," to his posthumously published book, "At End of Day" (2000). Among the literary gems are drafts, edited typescripts and proofs of his first novel, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," which was his best-selling crime novel and earned him international recognition when it was published in 1972.

"He was vitality itself. He spoke as brilliantly and wittily as he wrote," said John Silber, president emeritus of Boston University, where Higgins taught from 1988 until his death in 1999.

Higgins pursued nine careers, all of which are preserved in his archive. Armed with two English degrees and a law degree, Higgins became a journalist for the Associated Press, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a federal prosecutor, district attorney, defense attorney, novelist, critic, social historian and a creative writing professor at Boston University. He was also a fierce Red Sox loyalist and wrote "The Progress of the Seasons: Forty Years of Baseball in Our Town," a book on baseball in Beantown published in 1989. Each of his careers is documented in The George V. Higgins Archive at USC's Thomas Cooper Library (pictured below), a collection that included some 88 boxes when it arrived at the university.

The Higgins archive features unpublished early fiction and research and typescripts for his non-fiction books, "The Friends of Richard Nixon" and "Style and Substance." It includes drafts of his columns for the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald American and for legal journals, as well as files from his work as defense attorney for Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy. A substantial cache of unpublished fiction and screenplays from the 1980s and 1990s also is included. The memorabilia includes photos, his Boston Red Sox press pass, his vehicle license tags as an assistant U.S. attorney, his gun permit, yacht pennants and the cornet he played in the Boston College Marching Band.

Within the last 10 years, USC's department of rare books and special collections has assembled more than 20 of the most important collections in the field of modern American literature. Like them, the Higgins collection is regarded as a research and teaching collection, said Paul Willis, dean of the libraries at USC.

"The true value of a literary collection is that it is used by students and scholars so that they can better understand the writing process and the profession of authorship," Willis said.

"The George V. Higgins Archive complements our existing collections and enhances the marvelous collections gathered by the Thomas Cooper Library," said Willis. "Matthew Bruccoli and George Terry, dean of libraries at USC from 1988-2001, were responsible for bringing many of the major collections to the libraries."

As is often the case with so-called "hard-boiled" writers, Higgins' literary reputation and popularity were stronger in Britain than in America.

"He was an exceptional, perhaps the exceptional, postwar American political novelist," said Lord Grey Gowrie, former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain. "Like Patricia Highsmith, he (Higgins) is an American more appreciated, perhaps, in Britain and Europe than in his own country. I am delighted that the University of South Carolina has acquired his archive and that a major reassessment can now begin."

The Higgins Archive will be an outstanding resource for studying character-driven writing. Higgins' mastery of character dialogue is often compared to that of John O'Hara, a writer whose fiction he admired. "The quotes make the story," Higgins said. "Dialogue is character and character is plot."

While Higgins' archive is an obvious fit for USC's collections, which also include the archives of James Ellroy and John Jakes, it came to USC in part because of a mutual interest that existed between writer and university.

In 1993, Higgins addressed a banquet for USC's Thomas Cooper Society, a literary and advocacy group of USC libraries. He taught a writing class at USC in 1993 and participated in a conference on literary biography in 1998. Over the years, he developed a warm friendship with USC English professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, who has added his own extensive Higgins collection to the Higgins archive. The acquisition was a gift-purchase. The author's widow, Loretta Higgins, donated more than half of the material.

Higgins said, "You can't teach writing....You've got to learn to write on your own." Now, at USC, a bit south of Boston, the Higgins archive promises to give students, teachers and scholars revelations into the process of becoming a writer.

George V. Higgins ... the writer

Higgins was famous for creating memorable characters in hard-boiled fiction and telling his stories through dialogue. According to The New Yorker, "Higgins is almost uniquely blessed with a gift of voices, each of them...as distinctive as the fingerprint." Higgins said his purpose was to replace the omniscient author with the omniscient reader.

Despite his success at writing crime and legal fiction, Higgins didn't consider himself a crime writer.

"He denied that he wrote mysteries: He wrote novels about characters who had troubles with the law, some of whom were professional criminals," said USC English professor Dr. Matthew Bruccoli. In a 1993 review of his book, "Defending Billy Ryan," Higgins admitted his affinity for writing about criminals because "people who are violent and unpredictable and who break codes and laws and all sorts of solemn promises are more interesting than the people who behave themselves."

Higgins on Higgins: