Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library

The voluminous papers of the celebrated neurologist include letters, notebooks, drafts and other traces of a man who couldn’t stop writing.

For his 75th birthday, friends of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks gave him a printout of his brain scan inscribed with well wishes. Alongside it was a mock-scientific text describing a newly identified condition: “Brilliant Bi-Hemispheric Cortical Balance syndrome.”

This “chronic condition” didn’t just enable extraordinary intellectual contributions straddling science and the arts. “Further longitudinal observations,” the text said, “suggest that his uncommon neural activation has been responsible for a supra-personal uplifting of millions of other humans who have been captivated, informed and enriched by his stories of the human brain and mind.”

Sacks’s death in 2015, at 82, prompted an outpouring from readers and admirers, who saw him as the embodiment of the kind of erudite, patient, deeply sympathetic doctor who had been squeezed out by modern medicine. Even a decade later, he remains a symbol of free-ranging, even anarchic human curiosity — if not quite as dashing as Dr. Oliver Wolf, the case-cracking, motorcycle-riding Sacks stand-in played by Zachary Quinto in the new NBC medical drama “Brilliant Minds.”

Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Sacks’s personal archive, a trove documenting his intellectual explorations of topics as diverse as “aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins,” to cite a partial list that once appeared on his website.

“Sacks is one of the most important humanists of the 20th and 21st century,” Julie Golia, the library’s associate director of archives, manuscripts and rare books, said.

But his archive, Golia emphasized, isn’t just a record of one man’s outsize life and personality.

“One of the things that is really powerful to me about this collection is the role that Sacks played almost as an archivist of the experiences of people who were neurodiverse, using their words, preserving their words, listening with nuance to their wishes about how to tell their stories,” she said.

The archive is certainly big: 375 linear feet of material, including drafts for all 16 of his books, nearly 35,000 letters, some 600 notebooks and journals, roughly 7,000 photographs and boxes and boxes of research files. It covers the span of his life, from his childhood in London, where he was the precocious but troubled son of two doctors, to his terminal cancer diagnosis.

His voluminous (and often chaotic) notes and drafts were glimpsed in the 2019 documentary “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” which often shows him with a shirt pocket full of Flair pens in multiple colors. Last month, library staff laid out a sampling of the archive at its processing center in Queens.

In person, the multiple heavily annotated drafts and notebooks mixing philosophical reflections with, say, running accounts of taxi rides suggest a man who “couldn’t stop writing,” as his longtime assistant and editor, Kate Edgar, put it.

Sacks “had every surface in any place he lived covered with whiteboards, so he could just think and draw arrows and diagrams,” she said. “And before whiteboards, he had big sheets of paper.” Sacks, she said, “wrote on everything,” including tablecloths, napkins, his hands.

Sacks devoted a few hours a day to letter writing, and from early on kept copies of his outgoing correspondence. “He was the first person I knew who had his own personal copying machine,” she said. “He was terrified of losing things, so he often made a lot of copies.”

Edgar recently edited a collection of his letters, to be published next month by Alfred A. Knopf. Even at 700-plus pages, she estimated, it represents only about 1 percent of the epistolary output of a man who would sometimes even write a few sentences when sending in his electric bill.

The archive includes correspondence with prominent figures like Susan Sontag, Francis Crick, Jane Goodall and W.H. Auden, who reviewed his first book, “Migraine,” for The New York Review of Books in 1971, when Sacks was a little-known clinician working at a hospital in the Bronx.

In 1973, Sacks published “Awakenings,” which describes his use of the new drug L-dopa, or levodopa, to revive patients who had suffered for decades from encephalitis lethargica, popularly known as “sleeping sickness.” The book (later made into a movie starring Robin Williams) received a cool reception from Sacks’s medical colleagues, who accused him of substituting anecdote for science, and even of embellishing.

In a 1973 letter to the Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, Sacks lamented the “sad loss of clinical intelligence, of a humane approach” common in an earlier age.

“I love to read the ‘classical’ accounts” of the earlier generation of neurologists and psychiatrists, he wrote. “I feel as at-home with these, as I feel lost in the alien wastes of so much contemporary work.”

The image of Sacks fighting a lonely battle against a callous and dehumanizing medical profession has drawn skepticism. And he was criticized by some disability rights activists who saw his work, as the British activist Tom Shakespeare once put it, as “a highbrow freak show.”

But his writing struck a powerful chord with readers, who began writing to him in large numbers after “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” his 1985 collection of case histories, became a surprise hit.

Even today, Edgar said, the letters are still coming. “Sometimes people realize he’s dead, sometimes they don’t,” she said.

The archive, Golia said, also testifies to the intimacy of his relationships with patients, who often became his friends. Though the library only sparingly accepts artwork, it acquired some pieces that patients and profile subjects gave to Sacks, like a design for a humane cattle processing facility inscribed by Temple Grandin, whose experiences with autism Sacks chronicled in the title essay of his 1995 book “An Anthropologist on Mars.”

Sacks has been credited with helping shift perceptions of autism, arguing that what the world might see as a lack of communication or emotional capacity is actually a different, equally rich way of being human. But initially, he struggled to grasp the condition.

In a 1990 letter to the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Sacks said he had started spending time with Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic teenager who drew elaborate cityscapes from memory. He hoped to “say or show something of his mind, his singularity, his ‘style,’ at a deeper level than anything I have written on the subject,” Sacks wrote. “Tho’ here I find myself prevaricating and postponing, because I cannot pretend I really understand what goes on inside him.” (Sacks’s profile of Wiltshire appeared in The New Yorker in 1995.)

The library began discussing the acquisition in 2018, Golia said. (The library is not disclosing the purchase price.) The patient records appearing throughout the collection, Golia said, were particularly tricky.

“We wanted to think really carefully about how we were going to manage this in a way that captured the exact balance of access and protection of privacy,” she said. All patient records will be restricted until “well after” the person’s death, Golia said. Even then, researchers will have to sign agreements restricting publication of any “medically sensitive material.”

Sacks had his own zones of privacy, including his homosexuality, which he publicly discussed for the first time in his 2015 memoir “On the Move.”

In the book, Sacks described the repression and fear of postwar Britain, where same-sex relationships were criminalized. When his mother learned of his attraction to other boys, soon after his 18th birthday, she called him an “abomination,” and said she wished he had never been born.

Sacks escaped to the United States in 1960. He worked first at a hospital in San Francisco, where in his off hours, he found refuge in motorcycles, powerlifting and, eventually, an addiction to methamphetamine, which he emerged from with the help of psychoanalysis. After a fling on his 40th birthday, he remained celibate for the next 35 years, before finding a partner in the last decade of his life.

The library has extensive holdings on L.G.B.T.Q. history and the AIDS epidemic. That history, Golia said, tends to be told mainly as one of activism. But the Sacks archive, she said, helps add “a layer of nuance and complexity.”

“One of the most important parts of the collection is to capture the diversity or experience of queer people throughout their lives,” Golia said. “Activism didn’t begin with Stonewall, and grappling with your identity didn’t end after it.”

For Sacks, wrestling with the meaning of experience — his own, his patients’ — continued until the very end. One folder, with the jaunty title “Some Deaths I’ve Liked,” contains the wry and humorous last words of scientists and others, starting with his brother Michael, whose lifelong struggle with schizophrenia greatly affected Sacks. In his telling, Michael sat up abruptly in his hospital gurney and announced, “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette,” before immediately falling dead.

Another folder holds multiple drafts for “My Own Life,” an essay announcing Sacks’s cancer diagnosis, published in The New York Times in 2015. Golia read a sentence that did not appear in the published version — not quite the doctor’s own last words, but close:

“I hope I may enjoy to the end this beautiful world — I recognize no other — that I retain consciousness and lucidity, and that I may think and write till the pen falls out of my fingers.”