This collection of William Everson's personal papers consists of manuscripts and typescripts of poems, correspondence, and ephemera. Boxes 1-13 were given to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 1949 by William Everson and contain a record of Everson's life and work to that date. Boxes 1 through 7 are primarily poetry; boxes 8 through 13 are primarily correspondence. It is likely that the typescripts and manuscripts of the poems were collected and arranged for the 1948 edition of The Residual Years.

Boxes 14 through 25 consist of correspondence, newspaper clippings, working drafts of poems, proof pulls, galley proofs, magnetic tapes of Everson (as Brother Antoninus) reading his poetry, and ephemera. This material was given to the Library over a period of eleven years and from four different sources, Everson being one of them.

Boxes 26 through 30 contain William Everson's autobiography, Prodigious Thrust, and consist of manuscripts, typescripts, three complete typescript working drafts, and one final complete typescript (all with holograph corrections). They were given to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in October 1961. The autobiography is contained in five boxes, with the final typescript in a binder. Boxes 26 through 28 contain the three complete working drafts; box 29 contains "worksheets" that Everson discarded while completing his autobiography from the summer of 1955 through the summer of 1956. Box 30 contains manuscript and typescript chapters from both the first draft (Fire on the Earth) and the final draft (Prodigious Thrust), and Everson's notes on a variety of topics (mostly religious) that he eventually included in his autobiography.