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Wittliff Collections (Texas State University, San Marcos)

One-line summary: a free, two-floor literary-and-photo archive on the 7th floor of the Texas State University library — Bill Wittliff's Southwestern and Mexican photography collection paired with the official literary archives of Cormac McCarthy (recently doubled in size, October 2024), Larry McMurtry, Sam Shepard, Sandra Cisneros, and the Lonesome Dove miniseries (scripts, costumes, set photography, production stills). Over 500 film and TV screenplays. The rare local stop where the ceiling for a serious 12-year-old researcher is higher than she expects — primary-source typescripts of Blood Meridian with McCarthy's hand-corrected pages live in this building, and reading-room access is genuinely available by appointment.

Wittliff Collections (Texas State University, San Marcos)

One-line summary: a free, two-floor literary-and-photo archive on the 7th floor of the Texas State University library — Bill Wittliff's Southwestern and Mexican photography collection paired with the official literary archives of Cormac McCarthy (recently doubled in size, October 2024), Larry McMurtry, Sam Shepard, Sandra Cisneros, and the Lonesome Dove miniseries (scripts, costumes, set photography, production stills). Over 500 film and TV screenplays. The rare local stop where the ceiling for a serious 12-year-old researcher is higher than she expects — primary-source typescripts of Blood Meridian with McCarthy's hand-corrected pages live in this building, and reading-room access is genuinely available by appointment.

Scope note: this template covers steps 1–3 of the adventures pipeline (identify, support Maxine's research, shape goals). The deliverable webpage

  • video at step 6 is Maxine's own work — don't scaffold it here.

Links & Maps

Official:

Maps:

Reference & background:

Must-See / Big Items

The Wittliff is two floors (7th and a partial mezzanine) of rotating gallery installations plus a non-public stack of archives behind the reading room. What's on permanent display vs. rotating exhibition changes — verify the current exhibitions list before going. Numbers below assume the standing pieces are out plus current 2026 exhibitions.

  1. The Lonesome Dove permanent exhibition — the only permanent installation in the building. Original scripts (with Bill Wittliff's hand revisions — he wrote the screenplay for the 1989 CBS miniseries), Robert Duvall's Gus McCrae costume, Tommy Lee Jones's Woodrow F. Call costume, set props, and Wittliff's own toned black-and-white set photography (over 5,000 negatives from filming; ~100 published in A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, the way the show looks in your head probably is one of his photographs). This is the most complete record in any archive of how a single major TV production was actually built — script revisions side-by-side with the costumes and the photography.
  2. The Cormac McCarthy archive — McCarthy donated his papers to the Wittliff in 2007; the archive opened to researchers in 2009; in October 2024 it doubled in size with 36 boxes of private journals, photos, correspondence, manuscripts of unpublished novels, and research notes (these became available to researchers in late 2025 — verify ~2026-05). Includes drafts and revisions for Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men, screenplays, plays, and select unpublished works. Drafts preserve McCarthy's own page-numbering and annotation. Reading-room access. This is the only place in the world to do source-vs.-published-text comparison on the McCarthy corpus. If Maxine has read any McCarthy (his books are intense but the prose is the prose), this is the destination.
  3. The Sam Shepard archive — Shepard's papers including drafts of True West, Buried Child, Fool for Love, his short fiction, and correspondence. Shepard is on the short list of major American playwrights of the second half of the 20th century, and his typescripts are here in San Marcos.
  4. Bill Wittliff's Vaqueros of Northern Mexico photographs — three years (early 1970s) chronicling working cowboys on a ranch in northern Mexico where vaquero practice had carried forward more or less unbroken from the 18th century. Published as Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy (2004). The visual source for "what does a working cowboy actually look like." Pair conceptually with the Briscoe Western Art Museum's frontier-object collection — Wittliff's photographs are the living-tradition counterpart.
  5. The Mexican and Southwestern Photography Collection — major holdings of Manuel Álvarez Bravo (mid-20th-c. Mexican modernist, the dean of Mexican photography), Graciela Iturbide (his student; her Mujer Ángel and Juchitán-women series are canonical), Keith Carter (East Texas, mythic-rural), and Russell Lee (FSA-era documentary photographer who later taught at UT Austin). Rotating exhibitions draw from these holdings.
  6. The Geoff Winningham retrospective (running through July 2026 — verify) — Texas documentary photography, 40+ years of work; the 40th-anniversary retrospective is on view as one of the current rotating shows.
  7. The Shawn Colvin exhibition (current) — Wittliff's Texas Music Collection is a real holding (Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, Marcia Ball, etc.); Colvin (Grammy-winning songwriter, Austin-based) is the current featured musician. Music archives are unusual outside specialized institutions.
  8. The Larry McMurtry papers — McMurtry's own archive, the writer of the Lonesome Dove novel itself plus The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Brokeback Mountain (the screenplay, co-written with Diana Ossana — also held here). McMurtry was Wittliff's friend and frequent collaborator; the pairing of the McMurtry archive (novel side) and the Wittliff Lonesome Dove archive (production side) is the closest thing in any American archive to "how does a novel become a major TV miniseries."
  9. The Sandra Cisneros archive — The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, drafts, correspondence. Cisneros was the inaugural Wittliff writer-in-residence; her papers are deep here.
  10. The Wittliff's screenplay collection generally — over 500 film and television screenplays, including work by Bill Wittliff (he also wrote The Black Stallion, Barbarosa, Legends of the Fall), Horton Foote, and many others. If Maxine ever drifts toward film or playwriting, this is the building.

Stretch goals (do if time allows):

  • Schedule a reading-room appointment to actually pull a specific box from the McCarthy archive (or McMurtry, or Shepard) in advance. This is the move — it requires prep work but transforms the visit from "look at a vitrine" to "hold a thing the writer wrote on."
  • Tour the rest of Alkek Library — TXST's main library; multi-floor, real research stacks, good for orienting Maxine to what a university library actually is.
  • Walk down to Aquarena Springs / Spring Lake — 5 min from Alkek, the headwaters of the San Marcos River, glass-bottom boat tours, endangered Texas blind salamander and San Marcos salamander on display at the Meadows Center. Pairs naturally with the museum morning.

Research angles for Maxine

The research is hers — list questions to investigate and sources to start from, not answers. Pitch above grade level.

Hook into Maxine's current interests: (ask before finalizing — what is she into right now? bend the questions to that. If it's writing or fiction, the McCarthy archive thread is the trip — pull a specific draft-vs.-published comparison. If it's photography, the Vaquero/Iturbide/Álvarez Bravo wing is the trip; bring a real camera and shoot during the same visit. If it's film/TV production, the Lonesome Dove exhibition is the spine — script revisions, costume, set photography, what it takes to make a 6-hour miniseries from a 945-page novel. If it's social history or borderlands history, the Vaquero photographs + Cisneros + McMurtry all touch the same set of questions about Mexican-American Texas. If she's into music, the Texas Music Collection is a deep cut nobody expects.)

Questions worth chasing:

  • Writing / Literature: McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) went through enormous revisions between draft and publication. What kinds of things did he change — sentence-level (word choice, punctuation), scene-level (cuts, additions), or structural (chapter order, character)? Pick one passage from the published book and request the corresponding draft pages in the reading room — what's different? Is the change always an improvement? McCarthy famously didn't use quotation marks for dialogue; do his drafts show him deciding to do that, or had he already adopted it? Why might a writer give his manuscripts to a university archive at all — what's the deal between a living writer and a research institution, and how does that affect what the writer can later say about his own work?
  • Film / TV production: The 1989 Lonesome Dove miniseries adapts a 945-page novel into ~6 hours of TV. Compare the novel's opening chapter to the miniseries' opening scene (and the Wittliff has Bill's shooting script for the opening). What's kept, what's cut, what's added, and why? How does Wittliff's set photography differ from a "production still" (which is a publicity image taken on a set)? Look at twenty of his Lonesome Dove photographs — what is he doing with light, composition, and timing that a normal unit photographer wouldn't?
  • Photography: Manuel Álvarez Bravo invented a specifically Mexican modernist photography in the 1930s–40s — what does that mean, and how does his student Graciela Iturbide carry it forward into the late 20th century? Bill Wittliff's Vaqueros photographs were taken with a 35mm camera over three years on one ranch — compare them to a single-day documentary shoot's photographs and identify what extended-immersion gets you that drop-in coverage doesn't. Why does serious documentary photography of working people almost always use black-and-white, even after color became universal?
  • History / Borderlands: The vaquero tradition predates the Anglo-American cowboy by ~150 years and supplied virtually all of the cowboy's tools, vocabulary, and techniques (lariat / la reata, lasso / lazo, ranch / rancho, chaps / chaparreras, rodeo / rodeo, buckaroo / vaquero itself). Read the McMurtry novel's portrayal of Mexican characters and compare it to Wittliff's photographic record of the actual ranch he documented — what does each medium make visible or invisible? Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street is set in Chicago but is profoundly Mexican-American; what does her archive tell you about how she built a literary voice that wasn't yet on the bookshelves when she was writing?
  • Archival science: Why does the reading room insist on pencils only? What is the actual physical-conservation reasoning, and what kinds of damage to paper do archivists worry about most? When a writer's archive arrives at an institution, what does processing (cataloging, foldering, finding-aid creation) actually involve, and why does it sometimes take years before the materials are available to researchers? How are digital-born materials (emails, Word files) handled differently from paper drafts — what is the McCarthy archive's policy on his typewritten vs. computer-written work?

Starting sources (not exhaustive — she'll find more):

Observable field goals

Goals Maxine can verify or document in the field at step 5 (confirm & document). Concrete things to look at, count, measure, identify, or photograph — not vague "learn about X."

  • Photograph the placard for the Lonesome Dove permanent exhibition and identify which year the miniseries aired and how many Emmy nominations it received (the answer is on the wall).
  • Stand in front of one of Bill Wittliff's Lonesome Dove photographs and one of his Vaqueros photographs. Compare composition, light, and subject framing; write three sentences identifying one thing that carries over and one that's different.
  • In the McCarthy vitrine (or in the reading room, if appointment arranged), find one example of McCarthy's handwriting on a typescript and photograph it (where permitted). What kind of change is he making — single word, sentence, scene? Is it written in ink or pencil?
  • Identify and photograph at least one work by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one by Graciela Iturbide, and one by Keith Carter in the current gallery hang. Note the year on each placard and write one sentence on what makes each photographer's work visually distinguishable from the others.
  • Walk the full Geoff Winningham retrospective (or whatever the current photography rotation is). Pick the single image you would buy if you could buy one, and write 100 words on why.
  • If a reading-room appointment is arranged: pull one specific folder, record the exact box/folder number, and note three observations about what was in it that you would not have known from the published version of the work.
  • Photograph the view from the 7th-floor windows of Alkek (campus + Hill Country visible) — the Wittliff is high up, which is part of the experience.

Suggested itinerary

Designed as a half-day morning trip with the option to add a San Marcos River afternoon. Best done Mon–Fri during the academic year (the gallery is closed weekends Sep–early May) or any day in summer session.

If pulling reading-room materials (recommended for a serious visit): email the Wittliff 1–2 weeks ahead with the specific collection and ideally specific box/folder numbers from ArchivesSpace. Confirm the appointment 48 hr before.

  1. 9:00 am — leave SW Austin. ~35 min drive south on I-35.
  2. 9:45 am — park in the LBJ Student Center garage (closest paid garage to Alkek; buy a visitor pass at the gatehouse or the Welcome Center). 10-min walk uphill to Alkek Library.
  3. 10:00 am — Alkek Library 7th floor. Public galleries: ~1.5 hr at a slow pace. Start with the Lonesome Dove permanent exhibition, then current rotating exhibitions, then the photography wing.
  4. 11:30 am — If reading-room appointment is booked: 60–90 min in the reading room with the requested materials. Pencils, no bag, photo ID at the desk. Maxine writes her own notes — this is the moment she's doing real primary-source research.
  5. 1:00 pm — Drive 5 min to San Marcos's downtown Square for lunch. (Industry, Palmer's, or any of the lunch spots around the Hays County Courthouse.) ~45 min.
  6. 2:00 pm — Optional afternoon: Meadows Center for Water + the Environment / Spring Lake at Aquarena (glass-bottom boat tour, ~30 min, ~$10/person; verify ~2026-05 at meadowscenter.txst.edu). OR rent a tube/kayak and float the San Marcos River from City Park (Lions Club tube rental at the headwaters; ~$25/person all-day, May–Sep; verify).
  7. 5:00 pm — Drive home, ~40 min in PM traffic.

Family roles:

  • Chris leads: logistics, parking, reading-room appointment booking and protocol prep (he can handle the email exchange with the curators in advance). The Lonesome Dove production thread (he's seen the miniseries).
  • Heather leads: the photography thread — slow looking through the photography wing, Vaqueros / Álvarez Bravo / Iturbide compare-and-contrast.
  • Maxine drives: which specific writers' archives she wants pulled in the reading room — owns the prep work (browsing ArchivesSpace, picking the box). Owns the notebook in the reading room and what comes out of it. Owns whether the trip includes a river afternoon.
  • Solo vs. both parents: both is fine but not necessary. Real one-on-one trip with either parent works well — the reading room is quiet enough that a single parent can sit next to her while she works without it being awkward.

Connections

Combines well with:

  • San Marcos River — same trip; spring-fed paddle in the afternoon after the museum morning. The trip's natural extension.
  • Witte Museum, San Antonio + Wittliff — same-day Texas natural history + Texas literary archive (Wittliff morning, Witte afternoon), with San Marcos as the midpoint of the drive south.
  • San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) + Wittliff — same-day if pushing south; Wittliff in the morning, SAMA in the afternoon (the Mexican photography thread continues at SAMA's Latin American wing).
  • UT Austin's Harry Ransom Center — the other Texas literary archive (David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, Hemingway, the Gutenberg Bible). Doing both is the "two Texas literary archives" mini-project; Ransom Center is local and free.

Feeds into home projects / future adventures:

  • A serious Cormac McCarthy reading project anchored on a Wittliff visit: pick one novel (All the Pretty Horses is the gateway; Blood Meridian is the masterpiece but is genuinely violent), read the published version, then back to the Wittliff for a reading-room session with the drafts.
  • A Lonesome Dove novel-to-screen project: read the McMurtry novel, watch the Wittliff-scripted miniseries, hold the actual script in the reading room — write a 1,500-word essay on what adaptation gains and loses.
  • A documentary-photography project: a year of Maxine's own black-and-white photography of one subject she has access to (cousins, a Hill Country property, the family dog, whatever), modeled on Wittliff's three-years-on-one-ranch Vaqueros method. Pair with a Magnum / FSA / Álvarez Bravo reading list.
  • A potential Big Bend trip (big-bend.md) anchored on McCarthy's Border Trilogy — the landscape that produced the novels.
  • A creative-writing unit on revision: take one of Maxine's own short stories through three iterations, modeling on what McCarthy's drafts show about writerly revision.

Open questions / still to research (Chris's side)

  • Confirm exact gallery hours for our travel date — weekend hours start summer session (~May 26, 2026); verify at thewittliffcollections.txst.edu/visit.html.
  • Confirm the McCarthy 2024-acquired material is open to researchers on our date (it was scheduled to open late 2025 — verify ~2026-05).
  • Confirm the current rotating exhibitions on our date (Geoff Winningham retrospective is running through July 2026 per current listing — verify).
  • Email the Wittliff at least 2 weeks ahead if Maxine wants reading-room access. Identify specific collection(s) and ideally specific box/folder numbers from ArchivesSpace before the request.
  • Pre-watch Lonesome Dove Episode 1 (90 min) as a family before the trip — the exhibition is unrecognizable without it.
  • Pre-read decision: which McCarthy (or McMurtry, or Shepard) book does she want to read going in? All the Pretty Horses is the gateway; the play True West is the fastest entry into Shepard.
  • Decide on lunch + afternoon (river vs. drive-home) on a per-trip basis depending on season and energy.
  • Parking strategy: confirm LBJ Student Center garage is open to visitors on our date and the visitor-pass price; alternatively use the Pleasant Street Garage.