The Gregory Corso Archive includes manuscript notebooks, published materials and personal and professional ephemera of Gregory Corso. They are housed in 3 document boxes and occupy 1.5 linear feet.

The collection covers Corso's work in the 1980s and early 1990s, including both manuscript notebooks and published works. The ephemera includes professional and personal correspondence with Allen Ginsberg as well as materials documenting Corso's public appearances and professional collaborations. The ephemera series also includes photographs of Corso. Most of the items in the collection are signed.

The Corso Papers were received by the Stanford Library as part of the Stephen Rodefer Collection. Corso gave these materials, which were housed in a suitcase at the time, to Rodefer in payment for a large telephone bill Corso had accrued when he stayed with the poet in Corrales, New Mexico, in 1969. During this visit, Corso guest-lectured in Rodefer's class; Rodefer, in turn, hosted Corso's first reading, in ten years.

The material in the collection is somewhat fragmentary; many of the manuscript pages are handwritten and unidentifiable as part of larger works, although the emendations on the drafts provide a glimpse of Corso's revision process. The correspondence in the collection's second box is a sampling of professional and highly personal material, ranging from solicitations for magazine submissions to contract copies, to angry drafts. As representation of Corso's personal and professional life--quite literally what he was carrying around with him--the papers chronicle the important events of Corso's written life in the years 1969-70 and indicate the peripatetic nature of that existence.