How Alice Walker's Papers Went To Emory

In the spring of 1976, a young Rudolph P. Byrd was a graduate student at Yale, his future as a highly respected literary expert at Emory University just a twinkle in his eye. But already he knew what he admired in an author — and she was sitting right there in front of him.

Visiting author Alice Walker was a few years away from publishing her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Color Purple," but her early writings captivated Byrd.

He eagerly joined Walker and a small group of students for lunch at a nearby bistro after she spoke at a conference on African-American women writers.

"The fact that we were sitting together discussing her success and aspirations as a writer and my own aspirations to become a scholar and literary critic at Yale was proof we'd come some distance and the world had changed," Byrd, who is also African-American, recalled recently.

The friendship that began that day would be the catalyst for what some are calling a literary coup: Emory's acquisition late last year of Walker's extensive archive of personal papers.

"When I heard the news, I was green with envy," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and a friend of Byrd's. "I'm looking forward to him giving me a tour of the collection and watching him gloat over a glass of champagne."

Plenty of factors contributed to Walker's decision to house the papers at a school in her native Georgia, from the intangible to the political.

Walker was taken by the ambience of Emory's campus, and she shied away from a school in her adopted California because of policies that she said hurt minority enrollment. But Gates said an overriding factor was clear to him.

"Rudolph Byrd is one of the great scholars of Walker's work and African-American literature," he said. "There is absolutely no doubt that she made this decision because of her friendship and admiration for him."

Read more: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution