The Library of America

09/27/2026

The crime noir novelist Jim Thompson was born 120 years ago, on September 27, 1906.

In the late 1930s, Thompson was director of the Oklahoma Writers’ Project. Among his responsibilities were the compilation and writing of two books: a guide to the state and a labor history. Thompson struggled mightily against hints from federal officials to romanticize the state’s residents and especially its laborers. “Are the conditions in the country around Sallisaw as they were when Steinbeck collected material for his book?” Henry Alsberg, director of the Federal Writers Project asked. “I can only suggest that you read Steinbeck’s 'Grapes of Wrath' to discover how descriptions of the ordinary and the commonplace in concrete terms make literature.”

Thompson testily responded:

“Concerning your questions on 'Grapes of Wrath': It is difficult for me to believe, although I am a Steinbeck fan, that the author of the book ever was in Oklahoma. There never were dust storms around Sallisaw. This town is in the Ozark Mountains section. The land of this area, as elsewhere in eastern Oklahoma, suffered greatly from erosion but it was not caused by the wind. . . .

“You can gather from this that knowledge of the State is an insurmountable obstacle to writing of Oklahoma as Steinbeck would write of it. . . . If we had the room, as Steinbeck had, for characterization, and if we were writing fiction rather than fact, we could bring out the subtle differences in people and places such as Washington would like to see. . . . We must always keep in mind that our manuscript has to be read and approved by local people and that inaccuracies, such as Steinbeck's book was filled with, will not be excused when we are the authors.”

Thompson’s past ties to the Communist Party and his constant battles with federal and local politicians, particularly over the unseen manuscript of the book on labor history, cut short his tenure. Nevertheless, "The Labor History of Oklahoma" was published shortly after Thompson left in 1939. “Compared to what it should have been, the manuscript that everyone attacked so bitterly was pretty tame,” Gordon Friesen, a researcher on the project, noted. "Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State" appeared two years later, without any mention of the credit due to Thompson in its pages.

The work Thompson did for the Writers’ Project seems far removed from the novels for which he became famous. “But inside his crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s he found a way to remember and use everything that had ever happened to him, public or personal,” biographer Robert Polito concludes. “His family, especially his father and his wife, his Marxism, the Writers’ Project, American history, notably Indigenous Americans, the Civil War, and the legacies of slavery, and all those incredible jobs.”

While Thompson was still the director, he included his short story “Time Without End” in a privately published pamphlet of four works by members of the Writers’ Project. The story is available to read, free of charge, at our Story of the Week site, along with an introduction explaining Thompson’s fraught relationship with the subject of the story: his father. You'll find it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2026/03/time-without-end.html

Photo: Jim Thompson (far right) with Federal Writers’ Project staff writers Joe Paskvan and Louis L’Amour, c. 1938. (Jim Thompson Estate).

09/16/2026

Last night, celebrated authors Karen Joy Fowler and Nghi Vo, along with scholar and editor Brian Attebery, explored Ursula K. Le Guin's magical archipelago of Earthsea in our first LOA LIVE program of the fall. Watch the recording on our YouTube channel for a fascinating look at this foundational fantasy classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvcOEbkLEQU

Pre-order the definitive Library of America edition of Le Guin’s epic saga. This handsome two-volume set collects all five novels and nine stories of the complete Earthsea. As a special feature each volume includes maps based on Le Guin’s own hand-drawn sketches by award-winning illustrator Olivia Lomenech Gill. https://www.loa.org/books/the-complete-earthsea-boxed-set/

Tuesday, Sept. 16—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea saga has enchanted g...

09/13/2026

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, 150 years ago, on September 13, 1876.

By 1921, Anderson was very much aware of how completely his first two story collections—"Winesburg, Ohio" and "The Triumph of the Egg"—had subverted the conventions for writing short fiction. “The short story form has become among us very much what I call corrupt,” he told an interviewer.

“Publishers of short stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots for short stories were found and about these plots our writers sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however, being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a snappy, entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an hour after it was read.

“Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable to think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On the other hand, there were all about me human beings living their lives and in the process of doing so creating drama.”

The revolution in literature during the 1920s also reflected a geographical shift in American society. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot all hailed from the Midwest, following in the footsteps of such veteran writers as Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. To Anderson, the changing attitudes in American literature were as much geographical as literary, a rejection of what he saw as the restrictive primness of aging New England institutions in favor of the expansive physicality of life in the wide open spaces out west.

Anderson continued to influence later writers from across the nation. “It was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio that set me free,” recalled Illinois native Ray Bradbury in his preface to the 1997 edition of "The Martian Chronicles." “Sometime in my twenty-fourth year, I was stunned by its dozen characters living their lives on half-lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town. ‘Oh, Lord,’ I cried. ‘If I would write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that would be!’”

For the 150th anniversary of Anderson’s birth, we present one of his most acclaimed stories, “Death in the Woods,” which was published in The American Mercury 100 years ago this month. Our introduction to the story describes how, over a period of ten years, it grew from false starts and fragments into a classic included in countless anthologies. Read it here:
https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2026/09/death-in-woods.html

Portrait of Sherwood Anderson, 1933, by Carl Van Vechten

09/01/2026

We are heartbroken to learn of the death of Wendell Berry, peerless novelist, poet, farmer, and activist, at the age of 92. “He has set in motion forces that will for decades to come flavor our sense of what should be, what can be, and what must be,” writes author and environmentalist Bill McKibben.

Discover Berry’s remarkable legacy on our website, including tributes from fans and friends:

Major works: A Place on Earth • The Unsettling of America • Hannah Coulter • It All Turns on Affection • The Art of Loading Brush • The Sabbath Poems

08/10/2026

The secret languages of beetles, bats, birds, beavers, lichen, and trees were a source of fascination for the author Ursula K. Le Guin, and a recent exhibit in Los Angeles delved into this mysterious field, dubbed "therolinguistics."

“These artists—working with photography, performance, illustration, video, and more—ask us to prize kinship over alienation and humility over dominance,” writes curator Oscar Salguero.

Learn more and see images from the show:
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/weasel-murder-mysteries-and-tunnel-sagas-of-the-earthworm-a-new-exhibit-explores-ursula-k-le-guins-therolinguistics/

In the Library of Antarctica, the noble literature of the emperor penguin is preserved in icy splendor. Sound farfetched? Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t think so, and neither does a new project inspired by her invented discipline of “therolinguistics,” the study of nonhuman art and language. This su...

08/05/2026

Today, August 5, is the 92nd birthday of Wendell Berry, surely Kentucky’s greatest living writer—novelist, story writer, essayist, and poet.

In 1991, the novelist Wallace Stegner, then 82 years old, wrote an essay about Berry, his former student, and he styled the piece as if it were a letter. “You tried the wider world for a few years, at Stanford, in New York, on a year's Guggenheim in Italy, and eventually you concluded that you belonged back in Kentucky, where you had come from. That was a move as radical as Thoreau's retreat to Walden, and much more permanent. I am sure that people told you you were burying yourself, that you couldn't come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed, that you owed it to yourself and your gift to stay out where the action was. I was myself guilty of trying to persuade you against your decision, for some time in the 1960s.”

An assistant professor of English at New York University, Berry had already published a well-received first novel, “Nathan Coulter,” and won the Vachel Lindsay Prize for his poetry when he was offered a position as professor of English at the University of Kentucky. As he explained in an interview years later, “When I got the offer to come back to Kentucky, we knew, first of all, that we wanted to come back. Also, it had become fairly plain to me that I was a Kentucky writer; I wasn’t going to be a New York writer. I’d just lived in Kentucky too long.” He and his family moved to Kentucky in the fall of 1963, and the following year he purchased Lanes Landing Farm, first as a weekend retreat and then as a year-round home, where they have lived ever since.

“I remember a moment—in 1965, or a little after—when I realized that I didn’t have to be a writer,” he told another interviewer in 1998. “There were other kinds of work also that required artistry and offered satisfaction. From here, looking back, I can see what a defining moment that was. I had, in effect, decided not to be a ‘professional’ writer, but instead, in the literal sense, an amateur: I would work for love.”

Nonetheless, while working a farm that grew to become 117 acres, the “amateur” writer published nine novels and more than sixty short stories, all set in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. At our (free!) Story of the Week site, you can read one of them, “The Discovery of Kentucky,” in which Berry mixes a parade, politics, liquor, and a merry band of would-be pranksters. You can find it here, with an introduction about the world of Port William: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2024/08/the-discovery-of-kentucky.html

Postcard: “St. Clair Street, Showing the Old State Capitol, Frankfort, Kentucky,” 1950

07/11/2026

John Quincy Adams was born 259 years ago, on July 11, 1767. He was just shy of nine years old when the colonies declared their independence, and twenty when the Constitution was drafted.

Few of the men who were until recently conventionally called the Founding Fathers themselves had sons of an age and in a position to possibly play a public role in the new nation. John Adams, with three college-age sons in 1787, was an exception. It is perhaps not surprising then that his eldest son’s Harvard graduation oration should have attracted attention. Harvard’s annual commencement was always a key event in the civic calendar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with public officials, often including the governor, in attendance.

Such was the case on July 18, 1787, when John Quincy Adams delivered his oration. Also present was the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, Harvard Class of 1762, newly installed as the pastor at Boston’s Long Lane (Federal Street) Church. A liberal Unitarian—a sect then just emerging—Belknap was also a highly regarded historian and man of letters. (He would go on to cofound the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791.)

Impressed by Adams’s oration, Belknap proposed that it be published in the Columbian Magazine, a Philadelphia monthly to which Belknap was a contributor. “Highly honored” by the proposal, Adams sent Belknap a copy of the oration on July 30, though he requested that it be published anonymously and in conjunction with a classmate’s poem, lest it “be considered a mark of presumption in me to assume a distinction, which others, much more meritorious, had declined through modesty.” Belknap, replying on August 3, urged Adams to consent to publication without the poem (a copy of which he had trouble locating) and under his name, arguing that “the friends of Liberty and Virtue will have the farther Satisfaction to see the features of the Parent in the Son,” and that the “Country will have a pledge of a succession of abilities in the same Family still to aid her Cause and espouse her Interest.”

Adams relented in a letter to Belknap three days later, and in his diary wrote that “I have ventured upon a step, which perhaps some persons may censure; but as the circumstances are I know not what else to do. . . .”

You can read his oration, along with an introduction that provides the historical and biographical context for his remarks, at our Story of the Week site: http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/06/harvard-oration.html

Image: “A Westerly View of The Colledges in Cambridge New England,” engraving hand-colored with water colors, 1767, drawn by Joshua Chadwick and engraved by Paul Revere.

07/04/2026

The timeless themes and myriad interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, historian Ted Widmer writes in The Living Declaration, “speak to us, and they talk to each other as well, in a conversation that will never end.”

Among the most, er, vocal of these reassessments was 1776, the smash 1969 Broadway musical (and 1972 film) that roused the Founders to song. It’s also a personal favorite of Laurence Maslon, editor of LOA's American Musicals volume. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/the-ringing-legacy-of-1776-laurence-maslon-on-an-unlikely-musical-triumph-drawn-directly-from-american-history/?no_lightbox=1

Read his take on this singular blend of pop history and pop songwriting, and find out more about The Living Declaration: https://www.loa.org/books/the-living-declaration-a-biography-of-americas-founding-text/

For the Fourth of July holiday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we’re pleased to present this essay by Laurence Maslon, editor of LOA’s two-volume American Musicals edition and Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies, about 1776, the hit 1969 musical that brought the Founde...

06/23/2026

Last night, LOA LIVE welcomed beloved novelist William Kennedy for an intimate and freewheeling fireside chat with his longtime friend Paul Grondahl (University at Albany). Watch their full conversation, covering Kennedy’s love for his home city, his daily writing ritual, and the works and authors he most admires. https://youtu.be/bL3XrjHh4rs?si=xV8iaa_SzExXtuD-

Check out behind-the-scenes photos of Kennedy and Grondahl prepping for the livestream (glasses of red w**e in hand), courtesy of Kennedy's son Brendan.

The Library of America edition of Kennedy's Albany Trilogy, edited by Grondahl, is available to order through the LOA Web Store: https://www.loa.org/books/the-albany-trilogy/?no_lightbox=1

06/15/2026

Among LOA’s forthcoming Spring 2027 titles: a pathbreaking historical novelist reimagines the myths of America, one of the 20th century’s most famous figures recalls history in the making, and a singular science fiction writer with a personal biography worthy of a spy thriller joins the LOA series. See the full list: https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/forthcoming-spring-2027/

What is the past telling us about today? That’s a question we ask often at Library of America, and in our lineup of books for Spring 2027, we present a range of perspectives engaged with what has come before and its echoes. A pathbreaking historical novelist reimagines the myths of America in his ...