Commentary Magazine Archive Given to University of Texas

Before Philip Roth announced his tortured feelings about his own Jewishness to the world in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) and “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), he described to Martin Greenberg, the editor of Commentary magazine, his difficulty in writing about the subject. “If fiction isn’t hard enough to write, personal dilemmas — my own Jewishness — don’t help it any,” he wrote in a January 1958 letter.

That letter is part of a collection of documents and correspondence that Commentary has donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The archive, which spans 1945 to 1995, includes letters by and to Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Amos Oz, Elie Wiesel and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as the revisions of essays written for the magazine by George Orwell, Pearl S. Buck and Jean-Paul Sartre....