Baseball, basketball, football, blues, jazz, rock, Hollywood, Broadway, comic books — what would the planet look like without the great spewing fountain of American pop culture? As celebrations for A250, the country's 250th birthday, get underway, the Library's vast holdings document the global impact of American films, television, theater, music, comic books and even fast food. That impact can’t be quantified — but much of it can be catalogued.
Geraldine Brooks, the the 2025 recipient of the Library’s Prize for American Fiction, talked about her 10 books, her career as a foreign correspondent and her marriage to the late Tony Horwitz, a fellow reporter, author and Pulitzer Prize winner, during a recent evening at the Library.
Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" created a stir when it was published in 1952 and is still regarded as a masterpiece of American literature. Here, you can see some of his edits to the famous opening lines. The Library preserves Ellison's papers, including manuscript copies and drafts of the novel.
Arthur Sze will serve a second term as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2026-2027, the Library announced today, as we highlight National Poetry Month. His newest book, “Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry,” features translations from 13 languages and provides a personal guide to poetry in translation. It will be published today by Copper Canyon Press in association with the Library. Sze will be at the Library on April 14 for a conversation with the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage, on the art and process of writing and translating poetry
Hampton Sides, the bestselling author of several books about daring expeditions, including “In the Kingdom of Ice” and “The Wide Wide Sea,” writes this guest essay, in which he argues that to explore is to be human. It's the concluding article in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, "Into the Unknown," about world-changing voyages and discoveries chronicled in the Library's collections.
From the vast reaches of outer space to the depths of the Mariana Trench, the Library’s collections chronicle some of the Western world’s greatest voyages of discovery and exploration. These are journeys that crossed time and space, shattering the old realms of myth and superstition and revealing the known world, a place of maps and charts and taxonomic tables. Giants and dragons did not exist, it turned out, but a whole new universe filled with strange and wonderful things did.
Liza Mundy, author of the bestselling "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II," researched the bestselling 2017 book at the Library's Veterans History Project. She drew on the military service records of thousands of women who served in the war but whose work had been little recognized.
Wes Anderson's touching 2014 film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel," joins the National Film Registry this year. Anderson and his team used the Library's vast collection of hand-tinted European photographs from before World War I to help create the titular hotel's distinctive look.
The Library's Crime Classic series now has more than 20 titles to choose from, including “The Cannibal Who Overate,” which came out earlier this month. There's something for every mystery lover in the series, with classic stories that span more than 100 years of American literary history. You can get them from the Library's shop or from any major bookseller.
