For many people, Tesich’s name is tied to Breaking Away, the film that earned him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1979. The story grew straight out of his time at Indiana University. Tesich had been an alternate rider for the Phi Kappa Psi team in the 1962 Little 500. His teammate Dave Blase rode an incredible 139 laps and became the model for the film’s main character. Tesich took those memories and turned them into a story about friendship, class, and the complicated relationship between the university and the town around it.

The newly processed collection includes Breaking Away screenplay drafts along with handwritten edits and production materials. The materials document how characters shifted, how scenes tightened, and how Tesich worked to capture the spirit of Bloomington in the late 1970s. For anyone interested in screenwriting or adaptation, these pieces offer a close look at how a story moves from an idea to a finished film.

Tesich’s work in theater forms a significant part of the new collection, and the materials highlight how he approached the stage as a space for exploring moral and emotional complexity. His early plays, including The Carpenters, Baba Goya, and Division Street, explore family conflict, generational change, and the search for belonging. These works often center on characters who feel out of step with the world around them. Tesich used humor, frustration, and moments of quiet reflection to explore how people try to make sense of their lives.

His later plays, such as On the Open Road, Arts and Leisure, The Speed of Darkness, and Square One, take on broader political and philosophical questions. These works reflect Tesich’s growing interest in the moral responsibilities of individuals living in a fractured society. On the Open Road explores themes of violence, freedom, and the search for meaning in a world marked by conflict. Arts and Leisure examines the relationship between culture, politics, and political identity. Drafts of these plays show Tesich wrestling with these questions about power, responsibility, and the role of art in public life.

A critical part of the play materials is the supporting documentation that surrounds the scripts themselves. The collection includes playbills, set photographs, cast lists, production advertisements, and published critics’ reviews, often clipped from newspapers or cultural columns. These items exhibit how Tesich’s plays were staged, received, and discussed in their own moment. They also document the collaborative world around each production, from the visual language of sets and costumes to the ways theaters promoted new work and how reviewers interpreted Tesich’s themes. Together, these materials help onlookers understand not only how the plays were written but also how they lived in performance and how audiences first encountered them.

Tesich’s screenwriting career extended well beyond Breaking Away, and the new collection includes materials from several of his major film projects. These documents convey how he approached the unique challenges of writing for the screen, where collaboration, revision, and adaptation are central to the process.

The collection includes drafts of Four Friends, a film that explores the lives of four young people growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s and 1960s. Tescih drew on his own experiences to create a story about friendship, ambition, and the search for identity. Drafts of the screenplay show how he shaped the narrative to balance personal memory with broader cultural themes.

Materials from Eyewitness and The World According to Garp reveal how Tesich adapted his writing to different genres and production contexts. In these drafts, he experiments with pacing, character development, and the interplay between humor and tension. The collection also includes materials from American Flyers, a film that returns to Tesich’s interest in cycling and the emotional dynamics of competition.

These screenplays demonstrate Tesich working within the constraints of film production while maintaining his focus on character and moral complexity. Drafts often include handwritten notes that reveal his thought process as he revised scenes, adjusted dialogue, or reworked narrative structure.

Tesich also wrote fiction; the newly processed collection includes drafts and notes for his novels Summer Crossing and Karoo. These works illustrate how he approached long-form storytelling and developed characters over extended narratives.

Summer Crossing is a coming-of-age story rooted in the landscape of East Chicago. The novel follows a young man as he navigates family expectations, personal ambition, and the complexities of growing up in a working-class community. Collection materials exhibit how Tesich shaped the protagonist’s voice and how he used setting to ground the emotional arc of the story.

Karoo, published after Tesich’s death, centers on a script doctor whose personal and professional life is steadily falling apart. The novel explores themes of self-deception, regret, and the search for meaning. Drafts in the collection demonstrate how Tesich built the novel’s distinctive voice and how he approached the challenge of writing a character who is both flawed and compelling. Readers and critics have continued to point to the emotional depth of these novels and the strength of Tesich’s narrative voice.

The collection also includes materials for works that were never widely published, offering a rare glimpse at Tesich’s creative process outside the public eye. His unpublished novels include titles such as Rockbottom, Lord Kokomo, and The People. These drafts reveal how Tesich experimented with different narrative structures and how he used fiction to explore themes that also appear in his plays and screenplays.