Though scholars have never seen most of the material, they were made tantalizingly aware of its existence by Burroughs himself, who published a descriptive catalog of the archive in 1973. Oliver C. G. Harris, a professor of American literature at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, who edited a collection of Burroughs's letters published by Viking in 1993, said the material was the Holy Grail of scholars of the Beat generation.