Ransom Center Acquires T.C. Boyle's Papers The papers of the writer T.C. Boyle have been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the center announced on Wednesday. The papers - meticulously organized by Mr. Boyle himself, according to a news release - include binders of manuscript material relating to almost all of his 22 books of fiction and some 140 short story files, along with correspondence with contemporaries like Russell Banks and David Foster Wallace, both of whose papers are also held at the Ransom Center. In the release, Mr. Boyle, a longtime resident of California, expressed relief that his papers had, as dealers in rare books and manuscripts like to put it, G.T.T. - "Gone To Texas." "I am very pleased and honored to have my papers safely ensconced at the Ransom Center so that they may be preserved and made available to scholars," Mr. Boyle said. With such an archive, there is always the danger of damage or even destruction, especially when the papers are stored in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes in the basement of a very old house. Mr. Boyle, whose best-selling novel "The Women" was partly inspired by his own carefully restored Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, Calif., knows a thing or two about natural and man-made disasters. In "The Tortilla Curtain," his 1995 novel about illegal immigrants in Los Angeles, devastating fires sweep through a canyon near Los Angeles before the area is engulfed in a mudslide. In the short story "Big Game," a character is trampled to death by an elephant. And Mr. Boyle's most recent novel, "When the Killing's Done," involves a pitched battle between radical environmentalists and a National Park Service biologist over an island off California overrun with rats and feral pigs. In a 2003 Op-Ed article in the New York Times, Mr. Boyle (whose middle name, Coraghessan, dropped from his book jackets in the late 1990s, has been the subject of a grass-roots recall campaign), described his reaction to a contractor's warning that his house was certain to burn down in his lifetime. "I thanked him for his sanguine view and hired someone else, but I've never forgotten his prophecy, delivered matter-of-factly and without malice: the sun will shine, the wind will blow, your house will burn," Mr. Boyle wrote. From my window this morning I can just make out the mountains through the haze of smoke, and I can only wonder when our turn will come.