The Library of America

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 ...

06/03/2026

The searing political writings of America’s poet-prophet of democracy were in the spotlight during last night’s LOA LIVE program on Walt Whitman: https://youtu.be/k7qm4Oe6gmQ?si=eYENiC1YdRKI3zAC

Acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy), and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) explored Whitman’s visionary prose that speaks directly to our present moment. You can watch the full program on YouTube.

Walt Whitman: On Democracy is available to order from the LOA Web Store: https://www.loa.org/books/on-democracy-paperback/

Tuesday, June 2—Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and pol...

05/26/2026

Thanks for sharing this, Whistlestop Bookshop! "I was a bookseller at the Cumberland Book Shop in the MJ Mall when Ironweed was published in 1983. I remember the literary and customer excitement."

Published late last month, The Library of America edition of William Kennedy's The Albany Trilogy, now finally listed on my website's LOA page. I was a bookseller at the Cumberland Book Shop in the MJ Mall when Ironweed was published in 1983. I remember the literary and customer excitement. We gave away the New York Times Book Review in the store, and I am sure Ironweed was the lead book of the Review. Forty-three years later, I'm still here, and so is William Kennedy. In stock! https://www.whistlestoppers.com/the-library-of-america

05/23/2026

Margaret Fuller was born 216 years ago, on May 23, 1810. Over the past two decades, her writings have enjoyed a bit of a renaissance, spurred on by a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography and a best-selling historical novel, and the best of her writings were recently collected in a Library of America edition.

“We have been delighted by the sight of two fine Magnolias in full flower, in the garden of Mr. Davison, corner of Smith and Livingston Sts, Brooklyn,” Fuller wrote in a short notice for the New-York Tribune in April 1846. “We recommend to all who have leisure, and wish to be refreshed by Nature’s fairest love-letters, to visit this garden immediately. If the Rose is the Queen of flowers, the Magnolia is the Empress.”

It was a promotion of sorts for “the Queen of the South,” the plant that had been at the center of “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” an allegorical tale Fuller wrote six years earlier about an unusual specimen of Magnolia grandiflora in Louisiana. When Brigitte Bailey (a coeditor of the Library of America edition) was asked to recommend selections for newcomers to the work, she included this tale in a trio of writings that might prove more accessible to modern readers: “short, mystical, visionary pieces that show Fuller working with gender issues and archetypal symbols: ‘The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,’ ‘Leila,’ and ‘Yuca Filamentosa.’ Here we find a very different Fuller from the critic whose ‘analytic process’ ... judges a cultural work and interprets it for the reader.“

Many scholars have suggested a second reason why the Magnolia tale might be of interest to modern readers: the “interview” (as Fuller called it) between the unusually voluble tree and the story’s narrator can be read as a reflection of the relationship between Fuller and her mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arranged for her to become editor of The Dial—a job she held for two years without pay. “Fuller was attracted to Emersonian thinking because it emphasized the value of mind and soul without seeming to ask much about the possessor’s sex,” writes John Matteson, author of “The Lives of Margaret Fuller.” “However, there was a flavor of exploitation in the work she was given, even if Emerson sincerely apologized for the failure of The Dial to repay her efforts.” They were likeminded in many ways, but she ultimately faulted him for “inhospitality of soul.” “You are intellect;” she wrote to him, “I am life.”

“The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” is our Story of the Week selection, along with an introduction describing how Margaret Fuller became editor of The Dial and how the idea for the story came from an eccentric neighbor. You can read it at our free Story of the Week site: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2026/05/the-magnolia-of-lake-pontchartrain.html

Painting: Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, 1880, oil on canvas by American artist Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827–1889).

05/21/2026

“Thus began what Kennedy calls his annus mirabilis, the year when he got the Pulitzer, the cover of Time, the National Book Critics Circle Award. Suddenly everything hits for this guy who couldn’t get Ironweed published.”

On our website, Paul Grondahl reflects on his friend and mentor, the great novelist William Kennedy, whose Albany Trilogy was recently published by LOA. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/he-breathes-he-writes-the-voluminous-memory-and-deep-empathy-of-ironweed-author-william-kennedy/

"He always had flair. You can see it in his clips for the Times Union, stuff he was writing in the 1950s. You can scrape his byline and know right away it’s a Kennedy story. As Saul Bellow said, 'He doesn’t write a dead sentence.' That’s why he’s always revising, revising, revising—so many drafts to get that sentence to sing."

Order your copy of the Albany Trilogy from the LOA Web Store: https://www.loa.org/books/the-albany-trilogy/

The work of novelist William Kennedy marks the union of encyclopedic knowledge, built over ninety-eight years spent soaking up the city of Albany, and a profound empathy for human experience in all its forms, from the underworld of gangsters, gamblers, and hustlers to the heights of power and politi...

05/15/2026

Katherine Anne Porter was born 136 years ago, on May 15, 1890.

Between 1922 and 1960, Porter wrote a total of 26 stories (three of which she insisted on calling “short novels”). Then, in 1963, she published her first and only full-length novel, "Ship of Fools," which became the best-selling work of fiction in the U.S. that year.

Her legacy among readers, critics, and scholars remains, however, her work in short fiction. Among her stories the most famous is probably “Flowering Judas,” and it pained Porter to realize her stories, and that story in particular, were often used in classroom instruction and by writing teachers as examples of the use of symbolism. She was asked how writers should incorporate symbols into a story; at one panel discussion in 1960, she responded , “You don’t say, ‘I am going to have the flowering Judas tree stand for betrayal,’ but, of course, it does.”

Yet the subject kept coming up. “I never consciously took or adopted a symbol in my life,” she with Barbara Thompson for an interview that appeared in The Paris Review in 1963. She then explained:

“I certainly did not say, ‘This blooming tree upon which Judas is supposed to have hanged himself is going to be the center of my story.’ I named ‘Flowering Judas’ after it was written, because when reading back over it I suddenly saw the whole symbolic plan and pattern of which I was totally unconscious while I was writing. There's a pox of symbolist theory going the rounds these days in American colleges in the writing courses. . . .

"[Mary McCarthy] tells about a little girl who came to her with a story. Now Miss McCarthy is an extremely good critic, and she found this to be a good story, and she told the girl that it was, that she considered it a finished work, and that she could with a clear conscience go on to something else. And the little girl said, ‘But Miss McCarthy, my writing teacher said, "Yes, it’s a good piece of work, but now we must go back and put in the symbols.”’ I think that's an amusing story, and it makes my blood run cold.”

We present “Flowering Judas,” symbols and all, as our free Story of the Week selection, with an introduction that explains how the story was based on actual incidents in Mexico City—and how over the decades Porter’s memory of those events gradually shifted to more closely resemble her story rather than what actually happened. You can read it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2026/05/flowering-judas.html

Image: “Street in Mexico,” 1922, oil on canvas by American painter Walter Pach (1883–1958). Francis M. Naumann Fine Art via Smithsonian.

05/14/2026

Earlier this week, living legend William Kennedy celebrated publication of the LOA edition of his Albany Trilogy at the NYS Writers Institute at University at Albany. Joined by author Colum McCann before a packed house, Kennedy read the opening chapter of his masterwork Ironweed and signed copies of for fans and friends. Check out some photos from the event!

Order your copy of The Albany Trilogy: loa.org/books/the-albany-trilogy/

05/06/2026

Last night, historians Steven Hahn and Kidada Williams delved into the astonishing 1880 Senate testimony of Henry Adams, freedman, faith healer, and leader of the “exodus” movement of formerly enslaved people out of the South. Catch their full conversation, painting a riveting picture of post–Civil War America. https://youtu.be/Tzmyfu87itw?si=KnPoXt3J8uzFOkyW

Order the book from the LOA Web Store and save on the list price: https://www.loa.org/books/the-testimony-of-henry-adams-freedman-hope-terror-and-exodus-in-the-post-civil-war-south/?no_lightbox=1

May 5—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly enslaved...

05/04/2026

The partnership between the The Clemente Course in the Humanities and The Library of America goes back to 1999. Every year, LOA donates books to Clemente graduates, a meaningful tradition that has put hundreds of volumes into the hands of students across the country. Beginning in 2025, LOA also began offering full scholarships to their online courses for all Clemente students and alumni.�

At this year's Clemente Harlem graduation, 25 students received Black Writers of the Founding Era. The collection gathers 120 writers from the Revolutionary period — enslaved and free, Northern and Southern, soldiers and seamen and painters and cooks — whose words reveal the complexity of Black life and culture at the nation's founding, and the ways Black Americans claimed and enlarged the Revolution's promises from the very beginning.�

Clemente Harlem spent the year engaging philosophy, history, literature, and law. This book belongs on the shelf next to everything they read this year.

Congratulations, Clemente Class of 2026! 🎓

04/22/2026

It seems appropriate on Earth Day to mention that the earliest-born person in a surviving color motion picture is believed to be the American naturalist John Burroughs, who was born in 1837.

"A Day with John Burroughs," a mesmerizing nine-minute film shot in 1919 using a new motion-picture technique called Prizma Color, contains footage of the great nature writer at Woodchuck Lodge, the farm Henry Ford bought for him in 1913. (You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2wv-rbpRmk.) Eighty-two years old—he would die two years later—Burroughs was at “the summit of my years,” to quote one of the film’s title cards. He leads three children through the area surrounding his cabin and shows them how to uncover the joys of nature: living creatures under a rock, the camouflage of a frog, the evidence of glacial striation, and the habits of nature’s “clown” (a grasshopper).

Burroughs’s day with the children is a fitting summation of the fifty years he had spent convincing the reading public to become close observers of nature. “The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday,” he wrote in 1886. “You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed.”

During the last two decades of his life, he redirected his energies to the study of geology. “The youth of the earth is in the soil and in the trees and verdure that springs from it; its age is in the rocks; in the great stone book of the geologic strata its history is written,” he wrote in his 1916 essay collection "Under the Apple-Trees." “Even if we do not know our geology, there is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a granite boulder that gives us pause and draws us thitherward in our walk.” In dirt and in rocks he saw humanity’s future and our past: “The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all.”

“The Grist of the Gods” is one of the earliest essays in which Burroughs examines the cyclical nature of geology and life (rocks to dirt to plant to animal and back again). We present the piece in full, along with a brief introduction by Bill McKibben, at our Story of the Week website: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2026/04/the-grist-of-gods.html

Image: Detail from a hand-colored photograph of John Burroughs sitting on the steps of his cabin, Slabsides, from a photographic postcard printed c.1907–09 by Valentine & Sons Co., London, UK. (eBay)