This inventory is a simple listing of the contents of the boxes. Where poem titles have changed over several drafts, they have been listed under the published title if known. In some cases the published title is listed with the first line. The correspondence had not been pre-sorted and arranged to the same extent as that of the poetry. While the letters to and from Edwa Everson, William Everson's first wife, were separated from the others, all other correspondence was left a mixture of personal and professional correspondence, not in any consistent order. The correspondence inventory lists names of correspondents and the earliest and latest dates in any group. The organization and order have not been changed.

The inventory of the autobiography Prodigious Thrust is a simple listing of the contents of the boxes. Original order has been followed as much as possible, with the exception of removing the three complete working drafts and the final typescript from the original boxes and rehousing them separately. The three drafts have been designated A, B, and C--not for chronological order, but rather for the order in which they were originally found. Box 29, containing the "worksheets," has been kept in the original order, although divided into folders for ease of handling. Everson says of the worksheets that the order "is roughly chronological, working from the bottom up, but of course not strictly so, and it would not be wise to try to correlate chronologically by position in the heap." Box 30 has been kept in original order down to the folder level. A general contents description for each file has been given, such as "worksheets" or "working draft." If the file contains some other item of interest, such as drafts of letters or a poem not included in the autobiography, this has been noted.

In the 2010 revision of the finding aid, individual records were changed to separate item information out from the title field. The contents of box 12 and a short biography of William Everson were added to the finding aid.