Scholars and fans of the late Norman Mailer now have access to the feisty writer’s literary remains. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin opened the Norman Mailer Papers to researchers and the public on Thursday. Mailer was 84 when he died in early November.

The collection fills up more than a thousand boxes. It includes the manuscripts of all of Mailer’s books, “with the exception of one of the multiple drafts of The Naked and the Dead,” the Ransom Center said in a statement announcing the opening.

The Mailer papers also include approximately 40,000 letters, including a series of exchanges between Mailer and his Japanese translator from the 1940s to the 1980s. That series records “a fascinating discussion between author and translator about the composition and meaning of Mailer’s works,” the statement said.

Mailer scholars and aficionados will also be able to browse through the author’s research materials, financial records, photographs, scrapbooks, awards, and other materials that document his professional and personal life from the 1930s to 2005.

“Norman Mailer’s ambition was to write the greatest American novel,” Thomas F. Staley, the center’s director, said in a statement announcing the opening. “Perhaps he failed, but he was indeed a major American writer. His engagement with the culture, sometimes combative and bombastic, but always interesting, made him a dominant literary and cultural figure of the second half of the 20th century.” —Jennifer Howard