CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO. ? People all over the world seem to know about the Center for Faulkner Studies, from Japanese and Chinese scholars who have studied here to Oprah Winfrey, who chose center director Robert Hamblin to help with her book club’s “Summer of Faulkner.”

The center contains a world-class collection of Faulkner letters, manuscripts and artifacts, and is the only one of four American university Faulkner collections amassed by a single individual.

Treasures in the center’s Brodsky Collection include the author’s unpublished manuscripts and Hollywood screenplays; personally inscribed books to friends and family; letters to his wife and daughter, signed “Pappy,” as well as to one of his lovers; and private, personal diary entries about his alcoholism.

Faulkner, recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, chronicles a troubled, tortured South and escaping the burden of its past.

“Writing was a demon. It was the only therapy he had,” said Hamblin, who led an online discussion of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” for Winfrey’s readers in June.

The collection includes Faulkner’s recipe for curing hams, cartoons he drew for a high school class yearbook, a series of his last will and testament, and a pen-and-ink map he drew of his novels’ mythical county and town.

The center and its holdings are not housed in Faulkner’s native Mississippi, but rather the state university in Missouri’s southern tip, just north – the transplanted Mississippian Hamblin says – of where the American South begins.

The center came to be at Southeast Missouri State University after a serendipitous meeting in 1978 of Hamblin, its English professor, and Louis Daniel Brodsky, a Farmington, Mo., writer and businessman who’d been collecting Faulkner materials since he was a Yale freshman in 1959.

Through a mutual acquaintance, they arranged to meet at a Farmington bank where Brodsky had stored his collection in large safety deposit boxes.

Hamblin couldn’t believe what he saw.

“I still recall vividly my initial amazement,” Hamblin later wrote, “… as one, by one, L.D. laid before me the literary treasures he had been collecting for 20 years. … I had never before seen such a remarkable trove of Faulkner books and documents.”

Louis Daniel Brodsky describes the Royal typewriter, left, at his home in St. Louis that was used by William Faulkner during the author's visits to the home of Saxe Commins, his editor at Random House. Brodsky still retains the typewriter and Faulkner's pocket watch, both part of the collection of Faulkner items he gave to the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.

Hamblin eventually asked, “What are you going to do with all this?”

Brodsky had been too busy to give it much thought, though he’d always intended to put the collection in the public domain.

They organized an exhibit of the works in 1979 at Southeast that drew national attention. More exhibits, lectures, eight books and various journal articles followed.

In the process, Hamblin, the scholar, and Brodsky, the collector/bibliographer, became best friends and “brothers” in their shared passion.

In 1988, after doubling its size, Brodsky sold and gave the collection – then valued at $3.5 million – to the university, but remains its curator. The Faulkner center opened a year later.

“We were like two kids working in a single stamp book,” said Brodsky, who now lives in his native St. Louis. “We were truly like kids. We were exuberant. It was a total labor of love.”