These letters were sent by Sally Owen, the widow of G. E. L. Owen, to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1991. Trinity College then passed on the material to the Classics Faculty library in the same year.
The letters fall into two distinct series. The first is a cluster of letters from the 1950s which were bundled together with various manuscript notes and draft lectures, or academic papers, which Owen had written.
The second cluster of letters pertains to the mid 1960s when Owen was at Harvard University.