Literary Authors

The Kenneth Millar Papers (MS-L001) are located in Special Collections and Archives. This collection contains the personal and professional papers of Kenneth Millar. It includes manuscripts for novels, poems, short stories, and other works; manuscripts of political and environmental writings; reviews; screenplays; a typescript of Millar’s doctoral dissertation; correspondence; family photographs; and other personal material. The collection is 25 linear feet, including 59 boxes and 1 oversize folder.

Kenneth Millar, who wrote under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, was the best-selling author of numerous classic novels of detective fiction featuring the main character Lew Archer. Kenneth Millar was born on December 13, 1915 in Los Gatos, California, but he moved to Canada as a young boy. In school, he was captain of the boy’s debating team, and he later married the captain of the girl’s debating team, Margaret Strum. Margaret became the well known mystery novelist, using her married name, Margaret Millar. Kenneth earned a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Michigan. The first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949), was the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. Ross Macdonald was often called the natural heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. Kenneth Millar died on July 11, 1983. We also have in our collections the Margaret Millar Papers (MS-L002), the Matthew J. Bruccoli Research Materials on Kenneth Millar (MS-L003), and the Henry Clay Branson Salisbury Plain Typescript and Correspondence (MS-L018) (including correspondence with Kenneth Millar), as well as the first editions of the novels of both Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar.

For additional information, please contact us at (949) 824-3947 or spcoll@uci.edu.

In the early 1950’s Macdonald Harris began his career as a fiction writer selling short stories to national magazines while Donald Heiney was beginning his academic career as faculty at the University of Utah. In the mid 1960s Donald Heiney became one of the pioneer faculty of UC Irvine, while Macdonald Harris turned to writing novels.

For thirty-two years between 1961 and 1993 Macdonald Harris published a novel on average every other year. For the first ten of these years, Donald Heiney was a full-time professor at UC Irvine in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and then taught part-time in the Master of Fine Arts, Program in writing which he had helped found.

How are these two related? As Heiney explained for this biography in World Authors 1985-1990:

“My legal name is Donald Heiney. The use of a fictional pseudonym, MacDonald Harris, which I began with my earliest stories, has provided a convenient form of controlled schizophrenia which has enabled me to cling to an artistic temperment and a creative outlook even though I’ve lived most of my life in a banaly bourgeois atmosphere. The problem for a writer in those circumstances, I think, is to resist the forces that attempt to make him normal and to remain a little crazy. In this, at least, I think I have succeeded. If I could characterize the development of my writing over the years, I would say that it has become odder and more idiosyncratic, and at the same time more accessible to larger number of readers. I find that a difficult achievement, and one that I am pleased with.”

Archive Collection MS.F.004 contains the Donald Heiney papers and provides a rich source of information about his prolific novel writing and publishing process in the late 20th century. The finding aid is available now. There are various manuscripts, correspondence, research files and newspaper clippings and reviews for Harris’s sixteen novels. His non-fiction writings as a professor, books on modern European literature, book reviews, literary criticism and translations, are also similarly represented.

Detective novelist Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) born this day in 1915

The “Controlled Schizophrenia” of Donald Heiney and Macdonald Harris — papers now available