Best Collection Dedicated to a Best-Selling Author

Shortly before he died in late 1997, best-selling author James Michener revealed that he wanted the University of Northern Colorado — where he’d gotten his master’s degree and first started writing — to become the official repository of his works, a gift he wrapped up with a half-million-dollar donation to establish the archive. Today, the James A. Michener Special Collection fills 400 feet of the library also named after him, a vast expanse consumed not just by notes for his many novels, but also by his false teeth, his typewriter, and a list of all the payments he received for Centennial, his epic novel about Colorado. And the collection is still growing.