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Harold Hayes, WFU alumnus and Esquire Editor

The Rare Books & Manuscripts Department of the library is the home of the Harold T.P. Hayes Manuscript Collection. The collection encompasses the life of Hayes from his student days at Wake Forest College to his final work on wildlife conservation in Africa. Last summer, author Frank DiGiacomo spent a week in the Rare Books Department uncovering a wealth of material for his article on Harold Hayes. The article appears in the January 2007 (number 557) issue of Vanity Fair.

Hayes, a 1948 graduate of Wake Forest College, led Esquire magazine to pre-eminence in the turbulent 60s. As editor, Hayes secured prominent writers to document history in the making. James Baldwin, William Burroughs, John Berendt, and Norman Mailer were but a few of the writers and journalists with whom Hayes conversed for stories, headlines, and editorial opinions. The Harold Hayes Manuscript Collection includes hundreds of files and folders of original manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, drafts of articles, and cover designs for Esquire. Hayes’s work in the 1980s on wildlife conservation in Africa is also fully documented with original source materials as well as monographs.