“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings,” wrote Ernest Hemingway of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, born OTD in 1896. Eighty-five years after his death at age 44, Fitzgerald stands as arguably the quintessential American writer. loa.org/writers/210

Don’t miss our fall preview sale, going on now through Friday, 9/26. Get 15% off all LOA books and sets, including new releases like our single-volume edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, and the works of playwright John Guare. Visit loa.org/books.

A huge thanks to everyone who came out to the @bkbookfest.bsky.social this past weekend and stopped by LOA’s booth! We had a wonderful time meeting fellow mega-fans of great literature, chatting about our books, and enjoying the beautiful September weather. Check out some pictures from the event!

Patricia Lockwood is reading LOA’s Wallace Stevens collection in a new @nytimes.com By the Book. “The discouraging thing about writing criticism sometimes is the response: Now I never have to read anything by this person,” she says. “But I don’t write about writers who aren’t worth my attention.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s magisterial novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published 88 years ago. Written over seven weeks while Hurston conducted field work in Haiti, the book contains, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “the greatest synesthesia in the history of African American literature.”

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats tote bags are in, and we’re happy to report they can comfortably fit four or five LOA volumes, a small grocery run, or one full-sized cat. Find us at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday to get yours (booths 405 & 406)! www.loa.org/books/ursula...

With Gilmore Girls back on Netflix, we’ve been seeing a surge of people asking about our Dawn Powell volumes (sample below). As Rory says in S2Ep20, “She wrote 16 amazing novels, 9 plays, and there are some who actually claim that it was Powell who made the jokes that Dorothy Parker got credit for.”

Farewell to iconic actor and director Robert Redford, who played perhaps the greatest on-screen characterization of Jay Gatsby in the 1974 film version of Fitzgerald’s famous novel, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. Here he is opposite Mia Farrow, who starred as Daisy in the adaptation.

Today marks the centenary of Samuel Menashe, author of (very) short poems, winner of the first Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation, and a brilliantly unclassifiable voice. “The struggle is against too many words!” he declared in this charming 2009 @wnyc.org profile.

Playwright John Logan shares his love for Leatherstocking Tales author James Fenimore Cooper, born OTD in 1789: “What draws me to Cooper isn’t the action, it’s the elegy. Something beautiful was passing away, something uniquely American, something irreplaceable. And Cooper noted it and mourned it.”

I'm teaching this online seminar on some of Joan Didion's essays with @libraryofamerica.bsky.social, beginning September 29. Four sessions, 75 mins each. We'll be talking about some of her most prescient essays, which I think we should be reading right now. Come join. www.loa.org/news-and-vie...

Last night, LOA LIVE welcomed four distinguished scholars for a scintillating discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece of political thought, Democracy in America. Watch the full panel featuring @jbf1755.bsky.social, Steven Hahn, James T. Kloppenberg, and Olivier Zunz on our YouTube channel.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was born 145 years ago. A prolific playwright, she hosted her “Saturday Salons” in Washington, DC, for more than 40 years, welcoming poets and writers including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

“These sparkling essays take readers inside the lives and works of the poets you’ll encounter in this superb collection.” In @daytondailynews.com, praise for revered poetry critic Helen Vendler’s final book, Inhabit the Poem, out this fall from LOA. www.daytondailynews.com/lifestyles/b...

This Weds., 9/10, four eminent scholars discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a prescient account of the virtues and dangers of our politics and culture. With @jbf1755.bsky.social, Steven Hahn, James T. Kloppenberg, and Olivier Zunz. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/reading-de...

The word “hippie” debuted in print 60 years ago, in an article by Michael Fallon: “Five untroubled young ‘hippies’ sprawled on floor mattresses and slouched in an armchair retrieved from a debris box, flipped cigarette ashes at a seatbelt in their Waller Street flat and pondered their next move.”

The author Richard Wright was born OTD, Sept. 4, 1908. James Baldwin criticized Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) in the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” calling the book “a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.” But that's not the whole story (literally).

On September 3, 1838, a 20-year-old Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, boarding a northbound train in Baltimore and arriving in New York City less than 24 hours later. “Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever,” Douglass wrote. “It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing.”

Helen Vender could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” Seamus Heaney once said. In bookstores today, discover the final transmissions from this brilliant poetry critic, discussing writers from John Donne to Ocean Vuong in thirteen revelatory essays. www.loa.org/books/inheri...

“They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.” In @smithsonianmag.bsky.social, a look at Cormac McCarthy’s “enormous and chaotically disorganized” trove of books.

This September, join @nytimes.com critic @alissawilkinson.bsky.social for a four-part online course exploring the writing of Joan Didion, from her celebrated essays to less-known works illuminating her political and pop-culture fascinations. Find out more and RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/joan-didio...

“American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,” wrote H. L. Mencken of Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, born OTD in 1871. www.loa.org/writers/282-...

On Wednesday, 9/10, join LOA LIVE for a discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient masterpiece, Democracy in America, featuring distinguished scholars @jbf1755.bsky.social, Steven Hahn, James T. Kloppenberg, and Oliver Zunz. Find out more and RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/reading-de...

Poet Kevin Young, editor of LOA’s groundbreaking anthology of African American poetry, will discuss his latest collection at the Ink Book Club this September. “Poetry often offers us a balm, and never more so than in times of trouble—whether personal or large scale.” the.ink/p/was-it-all...

“I think Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language,” wrote Christopher Isherwood of the visionary author, born August 22, 1920. Watch an all-star panel discuss his legacy, melding SF, horror, and high literature.

Last chance to watch! Our exclusive online screening of O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder ends tonight, 8/21. RSVP for free and we’ll send you a link to view this fascinating film on one of America’s most influential poets and environmental writers: email.loa.org/h/i/3F28A6B7...

“Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious,” wrote @ursulakleguin.com of the cosmic horror originator, born 135 years ago today and a haunting influence on countless authors. “But Lovecraft's feebleness gave his writing its one strength: his tales can be frightening.”

Probably my favorite essay I've written this year. Mainly on The Missing Pieces by Henri Lefebvre (@semiotexte.bsky.social) + my own brief list of literary and artistic gaps. Might keep adding to this list... Thank you to Ben & @libraryofamerica.bsky.social www.loa.org/news-and-vie...

James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” is “a trailblazing text that helped establish early Americans’ shared sense of identity and purpose,” writes @wsj.com. Part of Cooper’s great epic of the American frontier, the novel inspired a bold film reimagining by director Michael Mann.

LOA sends a hearty congratulations (and a volume of Octavia E. Butler’s incomparable novels and stories) to the new graduates of the Clemente Course in the Humanities in Port Townsend, WA! Thanking her teachers, one student said, “You have pulled me out of the mud and now I feel like I can fly.”

Happy birthday to Ernest Thayer, author of the most famous baseball poem in existence, “Casey at the Bat.” Of his best known work, the writer said: “Its persistent vogue is simply unaccountable, and it would be hard to say, all things considered, if it has given me more pleasure than annoyance.”

“What’s true about On the Road—like most books with broad appeal to those still in the throes of youthful idealism—is that when you return to the text, you encounter not just the book but also yourself.” @alissawilkinson.bsky.social reviews the new documentary Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation.

“She exposes language to the shock of reality and generates words that capture what is new to our world while keeping our reflections about it alive, just as other great poetic thinkers like Montaigne, Nietzsche, or Faulkner did.”—Thomas Wild on Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism

Colin Still began filming his documentary “O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder” in 1995 and completed it nearly three decades later. Watch this captivating portrait of our “poet laureate of deep ecology” online next week, 8/19–21. RSVP for free and we’ll send you a link: rebrand.ly/snyderencore

“[Jim] Thompson never hits preordained beats,” writes William Boyle on @crimereads.bsky.social. “He can write suspenseful scenes with the best of them, but he also freely abandons obvious roads he might travel down.” Thompson joins the LOA series with five pulse-pounding noir novels in Spring 2026.

51 years ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on national TV. Later that night, according to Jimmy Breslin’s account in How the Good Guys Finally Won, Nixon called a friend and said, “Yes, a lot of heads of state have gone to jail. Gandhi went to prison, you know.” loa.org/books/788

In memory of genius satiric songwriter (and mathematics professor) Tom Lehrer, American Musicals editor Laurence Maslon recalls his memorable e-mail exchanges with [email protected] about which stage musicals were CLASSICS, GROUNDBREAKERS, HISTORIC, LANDMARK, or simply GREAT.

“American political life has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter in his groundbreaking essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," published nearly sixty years ago and still painfully relevant. www.loa.org/news-and-vie...

From August 19–21, tune in for our encore presentation of “O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder,” a captivating documentary about the revered poet and nature writer. RSVP for the free, virtual screening here: rebrand.ly/SnyderEncore Trailer + film info: www.loa.org/news-and-vie...

Read an excerpt from “On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt.” @rogerberkowitz.bsky.social @libraryofamerica.bsky.social www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/r...

Robert Hayden, the first Black American to hold the position of US Poet Laureate, was born OTD in 1913. Here, Elizabeth Alexander reads and discusses his innovative fourteen-part poem “American Journal,” written in the guise of an alien visitor to the United States. youtu.be/5uTBoDWEM3Y

This weekend marks the 101st anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth. “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience,” he said in 1952’s “Autobiographical Notes.” “Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

Three career educators have donated a 404-volume Library of America collection to their alma mater, East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan, in memory of their outstanding teachers there. “Who knows?” one donor said. “There might be a future author for LOA among the students!”

Totalitarianism seeks to eliminate “the shock of reality,” as Hannah Arendt put it—"the fact that something new, unexpected, and incomprehensible happens, something that might make you stop and think.” On our website, discover a masterpiece by one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophical minds.

Joyeux anniversaire to Alexis de Tocqueville, born on this day in 1805 and author of arguably the greatest book ever written on our nation's politics and society, the two-volume Democracy in America. loa.org/books/202

John Ashbery, Harold Bloom wrote, “remains both difficult and underread, even by his readers.” The first living poet to be included in the Library of America series, Ashbery was born 98 years ago, on July 28, 1927. Read a tribute to this towering figure on our website: www.loa.org/writers/239-...

Elmore Leonard was a “one-man writing factory,” says biographer C. M. Kushins. “Famously, he spent the first decade of his career getting up at five in the morning and writing at least one page of fiction before he’d even allow himself to have a cup of coffee.” @marinerbooks.bsky.social

128 years ago this July, a 21-year-old Jack London joined the Klondike Gold Rush. His health rapidly deteriorated in the extreme cold, but the ordeal would inspire one of his greatest stories, “To Build a Fire.” Read it here (remember to turn off the AC first): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/02/to-b...

William Sydney Porter was released from prison on this day in 1901, following a sentence for embezzlement. While incarcerated, he published 14 stories under an array of pseudonyms, including one that would immortalize him and become almost synonymous with American short fiction: O. Henry.

Raymond Chandler “wrote like a slumming angel,” said hardboiled master Ross Macdonald. The author of such crime classics as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, and creator of Philip Marlowe, perhaps the genre’s best-known private eye, was born 137 years ago, on July 23, 1888.