The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of Ved Mehta, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and the author of 19 books, as well as numerous essays and short stories.
In describing his own work, Mr. Mehta has noted that he writes about the five cultures to which he belongs -- "India, England, America, The New Yorker and blindness."
Born in India in 1934, Mr. Mehta was sent to an orphanage for blind children in Bombay at the age of four. Now a naturalized citizen of the United States, he holds a bachelor's degree from Pomona College and a master's from Harvard University. He also studied history at Oxford University 1956-59. He has served on the staff of The New Yorker since 1961.
An academic as well as a writer, Mr. Mehta has taught history and creative writing at Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Vassar and Williams colleges and at Oxford, New York and Yale universities. In fact, he was the first person to hold the Rosenkranz Chair in Writing at Yale 1990-93. His honors include a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as several honorary degrees.
Mr. Mehta has written about his life in his multi-volume autobiography "Continents of Exile"; the first book in this series, "Daddyji" was published in 1972, while the latest, "Up at Oxford," appeared in 1993. He has also written books on history, theology, linguistics, philosophy and modern India. The best-known of these works are "A Portrait of India" and the controversial "Mahatma Ghandi and His Apostles." He also wrote and narrated the television documentary "Chachaji, My Poor Relation," which aired on PBS in 1978 and on the BBC in 1980. The documentary received the DuPont Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism in 1977-78.
The Mehta archive now at the Beinecke Library includes all of the author's extant papers documenting the textual and publication history of his many books, articles and short stories. In addition to files relating to The New Yorker, especially during William Shawn's tenure as editor, the archive contains correspondence with S.N. Behrman, Isaiah Berlin, Timothy D'Arcy, Indira Ghandi, Brendan Gill, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Shirley Hazzard, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Alan Pryce-Jones, Bertrand Russell, Muriel Sparks and Han Suyin, among others.