James Joyce is widely considered the most important writer in English of the 20th century.

It was the generosity of friends of UB that assembled the world’s largest trove of Joyce material in Buffalo. Held by the UB Libraries, the James Joyce Collection contains more than 10,000 pages in all; it also includes Joyce’s entire private library, which was packed in crates and not unpacked after he left Paris at the start of World War II.

The Joyce collection was started in 1950 by Margaretta Frye Wickser who gave UB’s Lockwood Memorial Library the entire contents of a Paris library’s Joyce exhibition as a memorial to her husband, Phillip J. Wickser, a prominent Buffalo lawyer and businessman.

That gift attracted others, first from a publisher who was an associate of Joyce, and then from Constance Stafford, a widely active Buffalo philanthropist who was an heiress to the Jell-O fortune, and her husband Walter, who arranged and funded major purchases from Sylvia Beach, a confidant of Joyce and the first publisher of his most celebrated work, “Ulysses.”

The collection is a primary research resource for scholars from the U.S. and throughout the world.

The James Joyce Collection is irreplaceable. It is also extremely fragile. Some of the oldest papers in its archive—now more than 100 years old—are showing signs of deterioration. For scholarly and historical reasons, these precious papers must be preserved in their original form. Public funds are simply not available to protect the collection’s physical integrity. Private philanthropy brought the Joyce Collection to UB—now private philanthropy is needed to secure its future.

>Make a donation to the James Joyce Collection Fund.