New Yorker writer upset with archivists at NYC library

Thirty feet below Midtown Manhattan, there is an elite club that admits just a few members each year: the archives of the New York Public Library, guardian of the personal papers of luminaries like Thomas Jefferson, Truman Capote and Herman Melville.

Authors and intellectuals spend lifetimes trying to earn a coveted place inside. Now, one of them is fighting desperately to get out.

In a move that has turned scholarly heads, Paul Brodeur, a former investigative reporter for The New Yorker, who donated thousands of pages of his work to the library, is demanding that the papers be returned. He claims that an institution renowned for its careful stewardship of historical documents has badly mishandled his.

The charges are roiling the genteel world of research archivists, who usually toil in dust-jacket obscurity, and inciting a lively debate about which pieces of the past are worth preserving.

Over the past few weeks, Mr. Brodeur — known for his zealous pursuit of asbestos manufacturers and corporate polluters as a journalist — has mounted an elbows-out campaign to shame the library, firing off e-mails to dozens of prominent academics and authors pleading his case and enlisting their support. The library, which rebuts Mr. Brodeur’s claims, is refusing to return all of his work, escalating a year-old dispute that has played out on an unusually public stage. Beginning last month, Mr. Brodeur and the New York Public Library posted dueling accounts on the Web site of the Authors Guild Bulletin, an influential newsletter for writers.