The personal archive of Britain’s greatest living dramatist, Harold Pinter, has been saved for the nation.

Thousands of manuscripts, scrapbooks and letters – of which the vast majority are unpublished – have been acquired by the British Library. Material from more than 150 boxes has yet to be catalogued but will give an extraordinary insight into the Nobel literature laureate who broke the mould of British theatre in the 1960s.

His classics, including The Caretaker, The Homecoming and The Servant, have influenced a generation of British dramatists and introduced a new word to the English language – Pinteresque – to convey an atmospheric silence.

After the outcry over the loss of historic archives to America – including those of Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, and John Fowles, the novelist – Pinter was determined that his papers should not leave Britain.

The works of many British authors, including J. M. Barrie, Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh, are held abroad. British universities and libraries have struggled to match the large sums that American institutions can afford.

Pinter said yesterday: “I am delighted that the British Library has purchased my archive. I am very pleased indeed that it will stay in this country.”

In 2005, at the age of 75, he followed in the footsteps of Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In making the award, the Swedish Academy said that it had singled out a writer “who, in his plays, uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

Jamie Andrews, the British Library’s head of modern literary manuscripts, said: “These papers amount to one of the most significant postwar literary archives of one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. This is a wonderful collection that sheds new light on each stage of Harold Pinter’s unparalleled career over the past 50 years.”

The material includes a draft of Pinter’s unpublished autobiographical memoir, The Queen of all the Fairies, about his early life in Hackney. Mr Andrews said that Pinter’s reasons for not publishing it remained unclear.

The correspondence alone extends to 12,000 letters, while there are more than 100 boxes of drafts and notes for plays, screenplays and poetry.

The jewels include a perceptive and affectionate series of letters from Beckett. The two men regularly sent drafts of their plays to one another. When The Caretakeropened in Paris, it failed to inspire the critics. Beckett was so incensed, he wrote to Pinter: “We are all thunderstruck by the stupidity and vulgarity of the critics.”

Pinter’s key role in postwar theatre and film is documented through his extensive correspondence with playwrights and literary figures such as Philip Larkin, Arthur Miller, John Osborne and Tom Stoppard, as well as actors and directors, including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Peter Hall and Joseph Losey.

The archive, which includes theatre programmes, cuttings books and photographs relating to all his productions, has been purchased for £1.1 million with the aid of a grant of £216,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), among other sources.

It will take about a year to catalogue the material. A small display of manuscripts, letters and photographs will be staged from January 11 until April 13.

Lost collections

— Salman Rushdie sold his personal archive, including diaries written during the decade that he spent in hiding from Islamic extremists, to Emory University in Atlanta for an undisclosed sum

— Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, sent his archive to Emory University for about £500,000

— Julian Barnes, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot, is said to have sold his papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $200,000

— Arnold Wesker, best known for his plays Roots and Chips with Everything, sold three tons of letters, manuscripts and papers to the Texas university

— The papers of the novelists Peter Ackroyd and Malcolm Bradbury and playwrights David Hare and Tom Stoppard have gone overseas

Source: Times database

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