The Library of America

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 wine 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 ...

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).