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Leon Levy Foundation Awards $300,000 Grant to the Authors Guild Foundation to Preserve Over 100 Years of Literary Advocacy Archives

Guild News

June 9, 2025

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The Authors Guild Foundation is pleased to announce it has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to establish the Shelby White & Leon Levy Authors Guild Archives Initiative, a comprehensive project to preserve, process, and improve access to the archives of America’s oldest and largest organization of working writers. Bernard Schwartz, the executive producer of literary programs, will lead the project.

The initiative will establish the Shelby White & Leon Levy Authors Guild Archives Fellow, a two-year resident position, to oversee the project, working with the Winthrop Group, a leading history and archival services consulting firm, to survey, catalog, and inventory 112 years of Authors Guild records. The fellow will also create finding aids and develop a timeline of the archive’s history to make the collection accessible to researchers, writers, and the public. The fellow position will be for a term of two years. In addition, the grant funds will be used to digitize and make available online the first ninety-plus years of the Guild’s publication of record, the Bulletin, currently available only in print. The Bulletin, together with the Guild’s stored records,chronicles decades of organizational efforts, advocacy efforts, member news, and commentary that offer an indispensable social, economic, and cultural history of the U.S. literary world, how law and external forces have impacted the writing profession, and how the Guild has responded on behalf of authors everywhere.

The Authors Guild’s archival collection includes correspondence from authors including Pearl Buck, Madeleine L’Engle, Robert Caro, Upton Sinclair, Anne Sexton, Bertolt Brecht, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, E.B. White, and many others, alongside member files, contracts, legal documentation, and advocacy records that trace the Guild’s century-long mission to safeguard authors’ rights, freedom of expression, and protect writers’ livelihoods.

“These archives hold the DNA of American literary advocacy,” said Deborah K. Wilson, executive director of the Authors Guild Foundation. “They chronicle not only the Guild’s history but the broader evolution of literary life in America—from the fight against McCarthyism to today’s challenges with AI and digital rights. We are deeply grateful to the Leon Levy Foundation for believing in the importance of preserving this legacy.”

The project will commence in mid-2025 and reach completion by the end of 2026, when it will be publicly available on our website.