Her legions of literary and film fans will be heartened to know that all things Anne Rice will now be permanently housed at Tulane University, thanks to the acquisition of her archives by the school, in coordination with benefactor Stuart Rose and his family foundation.

For the homegrown talent, it was Rice’s sincerest wish that her most important remembrances, both personal and professional, would end up in the town she dearly loves.

“New Orleans is where I was born and grew up, where my parents were born, and where many of my novels are set,” said the author from her home in Palm Desert, California.

“I was living there when my husband Stan painted over 300 canvases, and New Orleans is where he died —(at 60 from brain cancer). It’s my hope that with the archives stored at Tulane, they’ll be of use for research in the future — research into New Orleans history, and into the lives of artists, poets and writers. I like to see things preserved. I shudder at the idea of people burning their private papers.”

The collection of papers is exhaustive and would take up half of a football field placed end to end.

“We have the original workings of her novels, her short stories, the screen adaptations of her books, fan letters and even many personal materials like a report card from her elementary school,” said David Banush, Tulane’s Dean of Libraries and Academic Information Resources.

On that kindergarten report card, the future author’s name was still Howard Allen O’Brien. Her parents believed it would be an asset to have a boy’s name … in this case her father’s. They kindly respected her wish to change her name to Anne in the first grade.

“We are still cataloging all of these amazing items, and awaiting Stan Rice’s paintings,” said Banush. “Apart from being Anne’s longtime husband, Stan Rice was a published poet and visual artist in his own right, and his works will be exhibited eventually in the university’s art museum. This collection will even have the special delivery letter from Stan asking Anne to marry him in 1961. The archives will also include dozens of Anne’s diaries, but Ms. Rice has asked that we not have access to them until she passes away.”

When the opportunity to acquire the Anne Rice archive first arose in 2017, internationally renowned book collector Stuart Rose, who had previously brought the John James Audubon Birds of America Folio to Tulane had an immediate interest. Although Rose lives in Dayton, Ohio, there’s a synergy between the benefactor and the bard.

“I grew up in New Orleans and went to Ben Franklin High School, and my oldest daughter graduated from Tulane in 2018,” Rose said. “So, we both had a connection to this city of the arts. For me, she’s the modern-day equivalent of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, or Bram Stoker, who penned Dracula. She started the current genre of dead people coming to life, which spurred an entire phenomenon. You just don’t see archives this great come along very often, and so I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of this.”

Rice’s works have spanned many genres over the decades, with themes as diverse as Christianity and even erotica. Rice claims her porn-infused literature was in protest against her strict Catholic upbringing and its perceived loathing toward sex. Now, in looking back, the author sees a common thread that connects every artistic departure in her catalog.

“It began in the ’70s, when I wrote ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ which many have characterized as a paranormal romance,” Rice said. “When it came to writing “Feast of All Saints” about the free people of color in New Orleans before the Civil War, I fell in love with them and wanted to bring them to life in fictional form. Later, I wrote “Cry to Heaven” after falling in love with the 18th-century opera singers, the castrati. Only gradually did I come to see that I wrote about outsiders, and outsiders who had their own group, or society. A deep desire to create in fiction the life of Jesus Christ also took hold of me. Jesus, too, was an outsider.”

Through its special collections, Tulane’s Howard Tilton Memorial Library will play host to The Anne Rice Archive, where it will join the literary papers of John Kennedy O’Toole, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and many other noted American authors with strong ties to New Orleans. For Rice, it’s yet another affirmation of her art, which has too often been pigeonholed.

“There’s a bias in American literary and academic circles in favor of contemporary realism, which has created something of a negative attitude towards anyone writing supernatural fiction or fiction with historical settings,” said Rice. “I suspect I’ve often been dismissed because of this. My hope is that the future will see a more open attitude towards all kinds of fiction in America. I’m doing all I can to make the collection rich and full, with the hope that it will have meaning for future poets, painters, and writers.”

Programming to celebrate the Anne Rice Archive will take place later this year.