Nestled in the archives of the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection is a short, 1864 account of the remarkable life of Hannah Carson. “Glorying in Tribulation: A Brief Memoir of Hannah Carson, For Thirteen Years Deprived of the Use of All Her Limbs,” is testament to how a severely disabled Black woman became an inspiration to the Christian community, both white and black, in Philadelphia before and during the Civil War.
The Library's Crime Classics series has just published "The Thinking Machine," Jacques Futrelle's 1907 short story collection. It follows eccentric professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, the Thinking Machine, as he solves a mind-boggling series of crimes. Van Dusen, in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, is “one of the most admired creations in the history of crime fiction," series editor Leslie S. Klinger writes in the introduction.
It's Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce's landmark modernist masterpiece, "Ulysses." Published 101 years ago, Joyce's book famously examines one day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of Leopold Bloom of Dublin, Ireland. The Library has some of the most extraordinary copies of the book ever printed, inducing a custom-made copy with a cover made of calfskin; an explanation of the book's convoluted symbolism by Joyce himself; and a full-color anatomical chart of the human body, annotated to show how body parts correspond to specific chapters in the book.
The papers of Ralph Ellison, one of the nation's greatest novelists of the 20th Century, are preserved at the LIbrary, including the sprawling mass of a manuscript that was edited into his posthumous novel, "Juneteenth."
George Chauncey is the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and the 2022 recipient of the Library’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. He wrote this piece about how he used libraries to research his landmark book, “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940."
Ada Limón, named the U.S. Poet Laureate last year, will serve two more years, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has announced, making the California native the third laureate to serve for as long as three years. Limón is composing a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper mission. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
A priest, a detective and an impoverished poet might sound like the setup to a joke - but Father Duffy, Sergeant Ben Goldsmith and Tim Brandon are no laughing matter in the gripping new addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics, "A Gentle Murderer" The landmark 1951 Dorothy Salisbury Davis novel, called "one of the greatest detective stories of modern times" by famed critic Anthony Boucher, is the most recent addition to the Library's series of crime novels that have fallen from popular attention.
The Library of Congress on Wednesday bestowed its Gershwin Prize for Popular Song on Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriter best known for such 1970s classics as “Both Sides Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Help Me.” The celebratory concert included performances by Annie Lennox, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Krall, Angélique Kidjo, Ledisi, Lucius and modern folkies Brandi Carlile and Marcus Mumford. It will air on PBS stations on March 31.
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, who is known for work that explores the human connection to the natural world, is crafting a new poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Her poem, to be released in the coming months, will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. It will travel 1.8 billion miles on its …
