AUSTIN (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- There are notes and letters from other icons of the 1960s. Cards from John and Yoko. A letter from Allen Ginsberg, the poet, offering to help him raise defense money. A plea by Norman Mailer to the governor of New York, seeking executive leniency on his behalf.

The papers of Abbie Hoffman, the puckish activist who gained a national reputation as a radical hippie, make clear the extent to which the tumult of that era regularly swirled around him: the showering of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, the nomination of a pig as a presidential candidate, the turbulent demonstrations that rattled the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Now the trove of letters, manuscripts, photographs, FBI surveillance reports, Christmas cards and thousands of other papers that memorialize Hoffman and his contentious role in U.S. history have been sold to the University of Texas at Austin by Johanna Hoffman Lawrenson, his third wife and companion for the last 15 years of his life.

They will be housed at the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, where some of the items are to go on display Tuesday after a ceremony to mark the acquisition. Later, after much sorting and cataloging, the rest of the collection will become available to scholars and students.

“Abbie Hoffman has not gotten his proper due historically,” Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center, said. “He really was a pathbreaking guy in terms of the street theater approach to gain attention for the causes he advocated, particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement.”

Hoffman, whose infamously anarchic work, “Steal This Book,” included tips on how to shoplift, might be amused to have his papers end up in so solemn a setting as a university research library. He was arguably the most emblematic figure of the youthful protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a man who helped coin the term “Yippie” and co-founded the group that took that name. But he was always more of a comic provocateur than an ideologue, specializing in thumbing his nose at institutions and formalities in zany ways.

In 1970, for example, when he and the other so-called Chicago Seven were being tried on charges of conspiring to disrupt the 1968 convention, he taunted the judge, Julius Hoffman, for having the same last name by calling him his “illegitimate father.”

The Briscoe Center, which has major collections of papers from figures in the civil rights and anti-war movements, paid Hoffman’s widow $300,000 for the collection. The payment was covered by a donor’s gift.

In an interview, Lawrenson, a photographer and former fashion model, said she had been living in a one-room Manhattan apartment with 75 boxes of Hoffman’s papers for 30 years and felt it was time to give them a useful home.

“I’m hoping the archive will help keep his spirit and his radical legacy alive and serve as a great resource for scholars studying 20th-century activism and organizing,” she said. “Abbie dedicated his life to social change, to creating a more egalitarian, compassionate world.”

Another archive of Hoffman’s letters and family photographs was collected by his younger brother Jack Hoffman, who donated it about 10 years ago to the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

The trial of the Chicago Seven ended with Hoffman’s conviction for crossing state lines with intent to riot, but an appellate court overturned that decision in 1973. The same year, he was arrested on cocaine trafficking charges, later jumped bail and spent years as a fugitive, living with Lawrenson partly in Europe and partly in a remote hamlet in upstate New York, where, under the name Barry Freed, he campaigned to protect the St. Lawrence River.

He surfaced in 1980 with typical Hoffman panache, appearing for a Barbara Walters interview on national television. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the cocaine case and served a four-month sentence. (Mailer later wrote Gov. Hugh Carey seeking a pardon for this offense.) Through most of the 1980s, he earned a living lecturing at colleges, focusing his activism on environmental issues.

Hoffman, who had long experienced bouts of depression, was found dead at 52 in 1989 at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, an apparent suicide.

Some of the artifacts in the collection display other sides of Hoffman’s protean personality: a sober term paper he wrote at Brandeis University about “Internal Group Conflict in the Jewish Community of Worcester, Massachusetts,” for which he received an A grade; a stub of a $150 ticket to Madison Square Garden for the 1971 so-called Fight of the Century between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali; several letters defending his authorship of “Steal This Book” in the face of charges from an East Village buddy that he had stolen the text from him.

One note in the collection suggests that despite Hoffman’s reputation as an anti-establishment prankster, the seriousness of his intentions was apparent to a broader audience.

Former President Jimmy Carter wrote him in 1988, two years after his daughter, Amy Carter, had been arrested with Hoffman at a protest over campus recruiting by the CIA, and discussed the delays in securing the release of U.S. hostages in Iran, who were notably held until the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. In the note, the former president absolved Hoffman of any responsibility for the arrest of his daughter, whom he referred to as a “strong and independent” woman. All the protesters were acquitted in 1987.

Robert Abzug, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Texas, said he was particularly intrigued by documents that outlined the changes in Hoffman during his years at Brandeis.

He came to the school as a relatively conventional student, wearing a jacket and tie, winning spots on the tennis and wrestling teams, even becoming the tennis team’s captain. But two unconventional professors, Abzug said, exerted significant influence: Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist who advocated social revolutions, and Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who argued that fostering human growth and self-actualization was more important than repairing neuroses.

Drawing on their ideas during rising ferment among the young, Hoffman felt liberated and was able to “unleash his personality” and lead “the theatrics ring of the New Left,” Abzug said. An example in the collection is a poster featured during the 1968 Democratic convention protests picturing Hoffman with an obscenity scrawled on his forehead and the caption: “The system is falling apart by itself. We’re just here to give it a little push.”

Hoffman’s style, Abzug said, entertained young people drawn to the movements of the 1960s and helped break down a stodgy culture as quickly as the ideas of more serious-minded radicals like Tom Hayden.

“It would have been a different era without the yeast of the Yippies and his making fun of a culture that was about to be challenged,” Abzug said.

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