CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, will give his papers to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Ebert, widely regarded as the most visible and the most influential U.S. film critic, announced his intention to leave his papers to Illinois’ Library at the kickoff of his sixth annual “Overlooked Film Festival” in Champaign on April 21.
An Urbana native, Ebert earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications at Illinois in 1964. He also did graduate work in English at Illinois.
Ebert’s papers will be housed in the University Archives, which also is home to the papers of many U. of I. alumni who went on to great achievement, including Olympics administrator Avery Brundage, playwright-screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, journalist James “Scotty” Reston and sculptor Loredo Taft.
Ebert began his career in journalism in earnest at age 15, as a sportswriter for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. He continued writing for that paper during his junior and senior years in high school and his freshman year at Illinois, moving from sports to the city desk and later to the state desk.
In the summer of 1961, Ebert joined Illinois’ student paper, the Daily Illini, writing a weekly column and working one night a week as night editor. In his junior year at Illinois, he served as news editor, and in his senior year, as editor-in-chief.
In 1967 – the same year he became film critic for the Sun-Times – Ebert published a book titled “Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life,” (U. of I. Press). The book is a social history of the university’s first century, based on the files of the Daily Illini, which also are in the University Archives.
Ebert began his movie review television show with co-host Gene Siskel in 1976, and Ebert has been nominated for an Emmy many times during his career. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975 for his film reviews the previous year.
Ebert is the author of several books, many about the cinema, including “A Kiss is Still a Kiss,” an anthology of his reviews. He also has written screenplays, including the screenplay for the cult classic, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970). Ebert has contributed to many of the country’s top magazines and newspapers. He also is a lecturer and an artist.
Details about the contents of the new Ebert collection, as well as plans for acknowledging his gift, will be announced at a later date.
According to university archivist William Maher, who will process and oversee the new collection, the University Archives already owns some Ebert material. In 2001, the film critic gave the Archives some 22 cubic feet of one-inch videotapes of “Siskel and Ebert,” the syndicated series he and Siskel co-hosted for more than 20 years and under various program names, and of “Ebert & Roper,” the series he and Richard Roper currently co-host. Siskel died in 1999.
Ebert documents – in the form of personal and business-related correspondence – can be found in the Archives’ Daniel Curley Papers. Curley was an English professor at Illinois, an acclaimed writer and the editor of the university’s literary magazine Ascent from 1975 to his death in 1988. He also edited the magazine’s precursor, Accent, for several years.
Curley was Ebert’s professor at Illinois and mentor, and later, friend. In 1986, they co-wrote the book, “The Perfect London Walk,” which was based on strolls they took around London in the mid-’60s when Ebert visited the Curleys, then on leave in London. The book is still in print.
Maher believes that Ebert’s correspondence yet to come will be “a great boon” to researchers and writers, and Maher said he hopes that Ebert’s papers will include material from the period “when he was shifting from a news reporter to a critic.”
“His correspondence with Dan Curley in the early 1960s as he first experienced London and South Africa and then struggled to find a niche in Chicago is quite fascinating,” Maher said. Ebert spent a year at the University of Cape Town, on a reading program through a Rotary fellowship.
Curley, who in his correspondence variously addressed Ebert as “Roger,” “The Jolly Roger” and “Rajah,” once described his protégé in the ’60s as “the finest young man I have met in the past 10 years. He has personal and intellectual qualities which would make for success in any field he chose to enter.
“He was in my classes at all levels of undergraduate study, literature and writing,” Curley wrote. “I could well wish that more of my colleagues were men of his alert mind.”
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