Charles Bowden Comes to the Wittliff Collections
- Charles Bowden Comes to the Wittliff Collections
The Charles "Chuck" Bowden archive in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos, documents the literary journalist's prolific career from 1970 to 2014, with a few family items dating back to 1947. Comprising 172 boxes, the collection includes his published writings on the environment, social justice, political corruption, and U.S.-Mexico border violence; correspondence, proposals, research, and financial materials; photographs, electronic media, and artifacts; and Bowden's library of books, LP records, and cassette tapes. A complete
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A researcher's dream: manuscripts, notes, photographs, tapes, letters, and memorabilia in the Wittliff's Charles Bowden Collection, MS 112. (© Katie Salzmann.)
[End Page 176] finding aid and folder list is on the Wittliff Collections website1 and on Texas Archival Resources Online.2
The materials were given jointly by Bowden and Mary Martha Miles, his longtime companion, literary executor, and co-editor of The Charles Bowden Reader, just prior to the book's publication in 2010. In addition to the archival finding aid, researchers have access to Miles's 250-page item-level inventory.3 which includes descriptions of, and at times contextual and other comments on, the many items in the collection. Miles is currently working to publish Bowden's earlier, unpublished works. These materials, while housed in the archive, are restricted until the time of their publication. Several boxes of materials given to Miles by Bowden's friend and colleague Bill Broyles are also included in the archive.
The following overview is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather is intended to provide an introduction and highlight some interesting items and possible areas of research. The papers are open to researchers. The Wittliff Collections offers funding through the William J. Hill Visiting Researcher Travel Grants.4
The Wittliff Collections
It's reasonable to ask why the archive of Chuck Bowden, who primarily lived and worked in Tucson, Arizona, is held in a Texas repository. The answer lies in the Wittliff Collections' commitment "to preserving a creative legacy…[and emphasizing]…the importance of the southwestern and Mexican imagination in the wider world." Bowden was a major southwestern writer whose work extends farther than Tucson and Ciudad Juárez. In fact, Bowden had been on the Wittliff's radar for several years. Founder Bill Wittliff, a photographer and filmmaker himself, took Bowden's portrait on March 2, 2007, remarking that "Bowden would walk right through the gates of hell to report on things that moved him, and to connect and tell the story of ordinary people, as a participant in that story." For Wittliff, Bowden's writing "encompasse[d] the tragedy of losing the beauty of the natural world, and of losing one's soul to the drug business."5
From this perspective, Bowden's materials belong in the leading archive devoted to the major writers of the southwestern United States, whose holdings include the literary papers of Cormac McCarthy, Sandra Cisneros, John Graves, and many others. Many Wittliff donors, like Graves in Goodbye to a River, write with beauty and passion on the [End Page 177] environment. The Wittliff Collections also houses the papers of other journalists who have written on traumatic or violent events, such as Dick Reavis, whose Ashes of Waco chronicles the 1993 FBI Waco siege, and Beverly Lowry, whose book Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders covers a gruesome 1991 Austin crime. Moreover, the Wittliff Collections was able to pay for the archives. Bowden, like many authors in today's literary publishing world, chose to deposit his materials in an archive during his lifetime, partly in order to support his writing.6
Introduction and Early Work
Chuck Bowden is perhaps best known for his article "While You Were Sleeping." Appearing in the December 1996 issue of Harper's Magazine, it broke in the U.S. English-speaking press the story of violent deaths of women in the border town of Juárez, Mexico. Afterward, Bowden collaborated with several Mexican photographers who were covering crime scenes for daily Juárez newspapers to produce the 1998 book Ju...
