In 2025, the tapestry of American literature was on full display at Library of America, both in the books we published and in our online content exploring this vast living legacy. Enjoy a retrospective of our top essays, interviews, videos, and podcasts, and we’ll see you again in the new year!

In case you missed it, we’ve posted the recording of last night’s engrossing talk between playwright Bess Wohl and memoirist Honor Moore on Wohl’s hit new play Liberation. Tune in for details on the play’s creative genesis and its links to the revolutionary literature of the women’s movement.

Six new poems by Wendell Berry appear in @plough.bsky.social! “Here plowing (and not just in a metaphorical sense—remember, Berry actually plows actual fields) turns up the field of memory and gives us a glimpse of the beauty that comes when we love a place and its people particularly and deeply.”

Last night at @strandbooks.com in Manhattan, playwright John Guare and dramaturg Michael Paller led an engaging discussion on Guare’s remarkable legacy for the stage and the new LOA edition of his work spanning six decades. www.loa.org/books/plays/

Tonight at @strandbooks.com, join pioneering playwright John Guare and dramaturg Michael Paller for a deep discussion of Guare’s remarkable works for the stage, including Six Degrees of Separation and the House of the Blue Leaves. Click here for tickets: www.strandbooks.com/john-guare-m...

This January, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik leads a four-part online course on two giants of American fiction: Philip Roth and John Updike. Register now for the class inspired by the multivolume LOA editions of these towering novelists, led by a brilliant teacher: www.eventbrite.com/e/roth-updik...

Not just a novelist, @ursulakleguin.com was also a cartographer. Her fictional geographies were on display this fall at London’s Architectural Association Gallery, and a companion book on Silver Press sheds new light on her peerless world-building. Read our interview with editor/curator Sarah Shin.

“I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you — Nobody — Too?” Inimitable American poet Emily Dickinson was born 195 years ago, on December 10, 1830. Of her inimitable craft, Poet Laureate Joy Harjo wrote, “From Emily I learned that the immense silences I found within me were navigable by words and metaphor.”

Next Monday, 12/15, join prophetic playwright John Guare and dramaturg Michael Paller at @strandbooks.com in New York City for a discussion of Guare’s remarkable works for the stage, newly collected in the LOA series. Purchase tickets and find more info: www.strandbooks.com/john-guare-m...

On 12/17, playwright Bess Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore for a discussion of Wohl’s hit new play Liberation and the literary roots of the women’s movement. RSVP for this free LOA LIVE event: www.eventbrite.com/e/liberation...

Last night, four acclaimed poets and scholars joined LOA LIVE for a fascinating personal discussion on revered critic and professor Helen Vendler. Watch @notquitehydepark.bsky.social, Dan Chiasson, @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social, and Christopher Spaide reflect on the influence of this towering figure.

‘Many things about “The Waste Land” seem to have annoyed Frost, some of which stemmed from his old disagreements with Pound. He disliked free verse, which he considered a lot of hot air and revealing of ignorance.’ Clare Bucknell on Robert Frost. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This #GivingTuesday, we invite you to support Library of America! Your tax-deductible gift will be put to immediate use in LOA’s publishing and public humanities initiatives bringing American writing that matters to readers around the globe. www.loa.org/annualfund

Tomorrow, 12/2, poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and Kamran Javadazideh join LOA LIVE to discuss the towering legacy of Helen Vendler, the revered critic whose last essays were just published by Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/helen-vend...

If you missed last night’s stellar talk with @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social on Octavia E. Butler, you can watch the entire program for free on YouTube. Hear these acclaimed writers delve into the genius of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and catch rare audio of Butler herself!

Next Monday, 11/24, two celebrated writers and scholars explore the craft and influence of Octavia E. Butler. Join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an evening dedicated to the revered SFF author’s luminous imagination. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...

The novelist Don DeLillo turns 89 today. Throughout his career, the books of this perennial Nobel Prize favorite have overflowed with ideas, language, personas, and historical fragments that, released into the minds of readers, transcend their fictional origins and become part of the real world.

On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, among the most significant speeches in American history. Despite its 2-minute, 10-sentence duration, this immortal oration has resurfaced in everything from the remarks of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Constitution of France.

On Tuesday, 12/2, join acclaimed poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social for a lively evening of reflections on the genius and influence of revered critic Helen Vendler, whose last essays were just published by LOA. RSVP for free!

Joan Didion staged her elaborate Thanksgiving meals “the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition,” writes Patrick Farrell in @nytimes.com.

John Updike’s newly published correspondence reveals a fascinating exchange with his LOA editor: “I am weak and growing weaker,” wrote the ailing Rabbit author a few months before his death in 2009, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” Read the essay on loa.org.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats makes the @publisherswkly.bsky.social Holiday Gift Guide for 2025! “This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction, who also harbored an affection for cats.” She certainly did!

Explore giants of American literature during our annual holiday boxed set sale. Collected works, complete editions, sagas, trilogies, compendiums, and more. See all boxed sets at loa.org/boxedsets. Sale ends Tuesday, 11/25

The first volume of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was published posthumously 135 years ago, on November 12, 1890. After discovering the manuscripts in which Dickinson had collected her writing, her sister, Lavinia, worked to have the poems edited and published—igniting a bitter family feud in the process.

On Monday, 11/24, join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an online program on Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction trailblazer and author of Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just out from Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...

Spotted in The Diplomat on Netflix: a row of Library of America books behind White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (played by Nana Mensah). Hard to see the individual volumes, though pretty sure that’s Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One on the left. S3 E7 for the curious.

Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.

“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.

In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.

Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”

“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.

Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...

For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”

Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.

“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.

In bookstores now: the LOA edition of John Guare’s plays, praised by Tony Kushner as “an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror.” Discover the writer of Six Degrees of Separation and order your copy: loa.org/books/plays/

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in his acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in the author’s absence on Oct. 28 (Hemingway was recuperating from a series of plane crashes at the time). (1/2)

Happy birthday to the brilliant Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts,” the genre-defying China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, “a Great American Novel, but also a Great Asian American novel,” according to @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social.

A big thanks to @theredshoes.bsky.social for sharing a correction to this post (with citations)! Read the thread for the true origin of this quote.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published 99 years ago this week, with a “respectably sexy” Hellenistic cover that Hemingway’s editor thought would appeal to “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.” A touch ironic for the he-man of American letters...

The literary cartography of Ursula K. Le Guin is on display at the AA Gallery in London through 12/6. “Le Guin began her writing process by drawing a map,” writes Mike Duggan in The Conversation. “This was as much a way for her to imagine a world as it was a technique to structure a story about it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, the inimitable author of SFF classics, a poet who won the admiration of Harold Bloom, and companion throughout her life to nearly two dozen cats, would have turned 96 years old today. Uncover her astonishing legacy, from the peaceful planet Haim to the wild shores of Klatsand.

“Rediscovering Rachel Carson reminds you that books can make the world a better place to live in,” writes the Irish Independent of LOA’s recent boxed set of the pioneering environmental writer’s collected works.

May Swenson moved from Utah to the heart of Depression-era NYC with a single mission: to become a poet. On our website, biographer Margaret A. Brucia, author of the The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (@princetonupress.bsky.social), discusses this daring, ahead-of-her-time writer.

“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...

In bookstores today, LOA’s one-volume edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, featuring the classic novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. Genius works of Afrofuturism, they ask enduring questions about colonization, gender, technology, and the future of humankind.

No 20th-century political thinker speaks as clearly and provocatively to our present moment than Hannah Arendt, born OTD in 1906. In a recent panel, four scholars discussed her 1951 masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism, out now in an expanded annotated edition from Library of America.

“Every cat lover will likely recognize a furry friend in a drawing or line of poetry in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats,” writes Portland Monthly. “She understood cats as well as she understood people.” www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-cul...

Eugene O’Neill’s late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh premiered on Broadway on Oct. 9, 1946. Set during the same 1912 summer as the playwright’s classic Long Day’s Journey into Night, Iceman, says critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, yields “an instinctive anticipation of the Theater of the Absurd.”

A clowder of advance readers got their paws on @ursulakleguin.com’s Book of Cats (yes, sitting on top of a book counts as reading for these little guys). Explore this full-color album of cat-centric poems, cartoons, and prose pieces, in bookstores today. loa.org/books/ursula-k-le-guins-book-of-cats/