The Wittliff Collections, located on the seventh floor of the Albert B. Alkek Library

Alkek Library

The Albert B. Alkek Library is the main central library of Texas State University - San Marcos in San Marcos, Texas. The Wittliff collections of Southwestern Writers and Southwestern & Mexican Photography is located on the seventh floor of the Alkek Library...

 at Texas State University, was founded by William D. Wittliff

William D. Wittliff

William D. Wittliff , sometimes credited as Bill Wittliff, is an award winning American screenwriter, author and photographer who wrote the screenplays for The Perfect Storm , Barbarosa , Raggedy Man and many others.Wittliff was born in Taft, Texas and moved to Blanco as a teenager...

 in 1987. The Wittliff Collections include the Southwestern Writers Collection and the Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection.

Southwestern Writers Collection

The Collection holds the papers of numerous 20th century writers, including Jim Hightower

Jim Hightower

James Allen "Jim" Hightower is an American syndicated columnist, activist and author.-Life and career:Born in Denison, Texas, Hightower came from a working class background. He worked his way through college as assistant general manager of the Denton Chamber of Commerce and later landed a spot as...

, Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...

, Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry

Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas...

, Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson

Willie Hugh Nelson is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie , combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger and Stardust , made Nelson one of the most recognized...

, Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...

, Bud Shrake, Texas Monthly

Texas Monthly

Texas Monthly is a monthly American magazine headquartered in Austin, Texas. Texas Monthly is published by Emmis Publishing, L.P. and was founded in 1973 by Michael R. Levy, Texas Monthly chronicles life in contemporary Texas, writing on politics, the environment, industry, and education...

magazine, and William D. Wittliff

William D. Wittliff

William D. Wittliff , sometimes credited as Bill Wittliff, is an award winning American screenwriter, author and photographer who wrote the screenplays for The Perfect Storm , Barbarosa , Raggedy Man and many others.Wittliff was born in Taft, Texas and moved to Blanco as a teenager...

, among others.

The film holdings contain over 500 film and television screenplays as well as complete production archives for several popular films, including the television miniseries Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove is a 1985 Pulitzer Prize–winning western novel written by Larry McMurtry. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series, but the third installment in the series chronologically...

. The music holdings represent the breadth and scope of popular Texas sounds, and include primary source collections of Progressive country

Progressive country

Progressive country is a subgenre of Texas country music started in the early 1970s in Austin, Texas. The term was coined by programmers at Austin's KOKE-FM in 1972 as a way to differentiate the style of country music in Austin from that being made in Nashville...

, Tejano music

Tejano music

Tejano music or Tex-Mex music is the name given to various forms of folk and popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of Central and Southern Texas...

, Texas Blues

Texas blues

Texas blues is a subgenre of blues. It has had various style variations but typically has been played with more swing than other blues styles....

 (including Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stephen Ray "Stevie Ray" Vaughan was an American electric blues guitarist and singer. He was the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan and frontman for Double Trouble, a band that included bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton. Born in Dallas, Vaughan moved to Austin at the age of 17 and...

), and Western Swing

Western swing

Western swing music is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands...

.

Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection

The Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection assembles a broad range of photographic work from the Southwestern United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, from the 19th-century to the present day. Contemporary imagery is emphasized. Materials also include photographs in books, manuscripts, serial publications, and ephemera related to the photographic arts.

The Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection holds major collections of works by Keith Carter, Russell Lee

Russell Lee (photographer)

Russell Lee was an American photographer and photojournalist.Lee had trained as a chemical engineer, and in the fall of 1936 became a member of the team of photographers assembled under Roy Stryker for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration documentation project...

 (vintage photographs), Mariana Yampolsky, Kate Breakey, Rocky Schenck

Rocky Schenck

Rocky Schenck is an American music video director and photographer. He has worked with such artists as Adele, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, The Cramps, Alice in Chains, Redd Kross, Godsmack, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Rod Stewart, and Van Halen, among others...

, Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide

- Biography :Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico in 1942, the eldest of thirteen children. She then married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years. Iturbide's six year old daughter died in 1970; after this death she turned to photography...

, Lázaro Blanco

Lázaro Blanco

Lázaro Blanco Fuentes , was a Mexican photographer.Blanco was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. He directed the Casa del Lago Photography Workshop in Mexico City from 1968 until his death....

, and Yolanda Andrade

Yolanda Andrade

Yolanda Andrade is a Mexican celebrity born in Culiacán, Sinaloa. Her career started at the telenovela Yo no creo en los hombres , along with Gabriela Roel and Alfredo Adame, which allowed her to work in bigger productions such as Las secretas intenciones with Cristian Castro.-Biography:After...

, and others.

External links

• The Wittliff Collections
• Texas State University-San Marcos
• Albert B. Alkek Library