Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, escaping Saigon with his family the day before the capital city fell. They went to military bases in the Philippines and Guam, then lived in Pennsylvania for a few years before finally settling in San Jose, California, where he discovered the American dream was complicated. His literary work, most notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Sympathizer," (now an HBO series) explores the duality that he feels as a refugee and as an American writer. He spoke about his work at the National Book Festival, sharing stories of how his local library was his "salvation" as a child.
James McBride, winner of the Library's 2024 Prize for American Fiction, took the main stage at the National Book Festival last weekend, delighting a rapturous crowd with anecdotes and observations about his best-selling books and his remarkable writing career. "Love is the greatest novel ever written," he said. "That's it."
Stories can be a lot of things, as journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” but in the end they are powerful instruments that can be used for good or evil, to comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. “The thing about stories is that they are emotional and oftentimes appeal to …
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the internationally recognized philosopher, author and professor, will be awarded the 2024 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today. The $500,000 prize, awarded every two years, recognizes individuals whose outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society. Since the 1990s, Appiah’s work has been widely regarded as having deepened the understanding of ideas around identity and belonging, concepts that remain deeply consequential. The Library is developing programming on the theme of “Thinking Together” that will showcase Appiah’s work for a public audience.
At the end of the 19th century, educator William Henry Crogman had a revolutionary idea: a textbook on African American history, achievements and survival for Black students both in and outside of the classroom. His "Progress of a Race," a textbook that told the history of African Americans as overcoming violence and bigotry, was not the first of its kind but probably the most influential. It caught on quickly, was heavily circulated and sold door-to-door through subscription for decades. The Library preserves several editions of this book, including the 1898 first edition.
The folklorist Sidney Robertson was one of the trailblazing American women of the 1930s and 1940s, the kind of life you’d associate with Martha Gellhorn, Dorothea Lange or Zora Neale Hurston. Her work directing the California Folk Music Project from 1938-40 is the subject "California Gold," a new book from the Library and the University of California Press.
—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division. Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show. “What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in …
Volunteers have been working over the past five years to transcribe the Library’s manuscripts of Walt Whitman, one of the nation’s most iconic poets, from three major collections. Can you help proofread the final 4,000 pages? This June, the Library is hoping you'll do just that as we celebrate Pride month.
When reference librarian Clinton Drake was going through an ancestor's grocery store account book from nearly a century ago, he came across a startling purchase: "blood." It led to research into the foodways of a bygone era of immigrants from northern Europe.
