J. M. Coetzee’s association with The University of Texas at Austin

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and graduated from the University of Cape Town. After working three years as a computer programmer in England, he enrolled in The University of Texas at Austin in 1965 to pursue his Ph.D. in English, linguistics and Germanic languages, which he earned in 1969. While at the University, he conducted research in the Ransom Center’s collections for his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

Coetzee’s archive now resides in the Ransom Center and is available for research.
Below, Coetzee writes of his association with The University of Texas at Austin.

Somewhere among the boxes of letters included in this collection is one from the Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas to John M. Coetzee at an address in Surrey, England. It is dated April, 1965; it thanks young John for his application to come and study in Austin and is pleased to offer him a teaching assistantship at a salary of $2,000 per annum while he works toward a graduate degree.

Thus was initiated my association with The University of Texas, an association by now nearly half a century old. In the 1960s the Ransom Center already had a certain fame, worldwide, for having struck out into a new field for collectors, the field of living authors and their manuscripts. The word “brash” tended to find its way into comments on the Ransom Center and its activities, as did the phrase “oil money.”

I am not sure that such supercilious attitudes would find much traction nowadays. The present-day Ransom Center has custody of one of the world’s great collections of twentieth-century manuscripts, a collection that will bring scholars to Texas for many years to come.

It is a privilege to have graduated from being a teaching assistant at The University of Texas to being one of the authors whose papers are conserved here.

I write these words from my home on the south coast of the Australian mainland, an area prone to destructive bushfires. It is a secondary source of satisfaction to me that, even if this house itself goes up in flames, the work of my hands will have been whisked away to a place of safety in the vaults of the Ransom Center.