Library of Congress's Blog, page 10

The Season of Edgar Allan Poe: Autumn, Halloween and The Falling Darkness

Edgar Allan Poe died 175 years ago today, Oct. 7, 1849, in a Baltimore hospital under circumstances that no one has ever fully understood.

He was en route from speaking engagements in Virginia to New York when he went missing in Baltimore. After several days, he was found the night of Oct. 3, the day of a local election, lying outside a pub that doubled as a voting precinct. He could barely speak, apparently had been beaten and was wearing shabby clothes that were not his. There have been endless theories about he came to be found in this state, from rabies to a brain tumor to severe alcoholism. Many historians say it’s most likely that he was the victim of cooping, a brutal form of  voting fraud in which victims were violently forced to impersonate legitimate voters at the polls, oftentimes with liberal amounts of alcohol involved.

In any event, Poe lingered for four days in a windowless hospital room, never regaining coherence. He died at 5 a.m. on Oct. 7. He was 40.

Among his literary masterpieces was “The Raven,” which began with one of the most famous lines in American poetry: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…”

Though Poe and the poem are now closely linked with his sometimes home and burial place of Baltimore (the titular bird is now the mascot for the city’s NFL franchise), he was born in Boston and educated as a youth in England and the poem was written in New York. It first appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on Jan. 29, 1845. It was buried on an inside page amid ads for lamps and sheet music.

Poe spent a lot of time thinking about burying things (like tell-tale hearts), but this particular newspaper copy was headed for immortality.

“The Raven,” the dark tale of a grieving young lover encountering a black bird with a fiery stare and a one-word vocabulary, is one of the most anthologized and instantly recognizable poems in American history.

The conclusion of “The Raven” as first published in the New York Evening Mirror on Jan. 29, 1845, shoehorned in among advertisements. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division preserves an original copy of the Evening Mirror that day, marking the moment the poem entered the national culture.

It was clearly inspired by Poe’s tragic circumstances.

Poe and his first cousin, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, had married in 1836, when she was 13 and he was 27. There has been much speculation about their relationship (even for the era, she was extremely young to be married) but the pair seemed devoted. Her adoring letters refer to him as Eddie.

The couple was struggling to get by on the earnings from Poe’s literary career when, in 1842, Virginia contracted tuberculosis. She was just 18. It was a slow and terrible way to die — as the bacterial infection spread in the lungs, it caused bloody coughs, chills, fever, weight loss and night sweats. As the years ground on, the disease waxed and waned. Poe, already possessed of a macabre imagination and often debilitated by alcohol, later described the period this way: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

It was during this terrible period that he wrote “The Raven.” He seemed to be anticipating, with great dread, the depression that would crush him after Virginia’s death:

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
               Nameless here for evermore.”

He published it in January 1845, with the bird’s resounding refrain of “Nevermore” becoming a sensation. The editors at the Evening Mirror considered its remarkable gothic nature, haunting phrases, perfect meter and recognized genius: “It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it,” the paper wrote.

In an essay published the next year, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe uses the poem as an example of his work method. He never mentions Virginia’s impending death as an influence, but late in the essay he does explain the poem’s dark power.

The first part of the poem is straightforward, he wrote. The beautiful Lenore has died. Her grieving suitor is reading late one night, trying to fend off his grief.  A raven raps at the window and flies in when it is opened. The narrator, more bemused than alarmed, reasons that the bird has escaped its owner, happened by his illuminated window late at night and sought refuge. It can mimic speech, like a parrot, but knows only one word: “nevermore.”

A little weird, sure, but this is all rational.

But then the narrator reclines on a sofa where Lenore had often lain, resting his head “on the cushion’s velvet lining.” Meant to be a comfort, the soft fabric instead reminds him that Lenore’s cheek had often lain on this exact spot. The shock sends his mind into hallucinations:

“Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.”

The world has warped — seraphim are celestial creatures, winged angels — and our narrator now believes that he is hearing the footsteps of invisible spirits on the carpet all around him.

Now things turn brutal. The narrator knows perfectly well that the bird can only say “Nevermore,” but he begins to ask it hopeful questions — Is there spiritual help for his pain? Will he and Lenore be reunited in the afterlife?

“Nevermore,” thunders the bird, lashing him with the pain he wanted. This is a sort of perverse masochism, Poe writes in the essay, as the narrator is impelled by “the human thirst for self torture.” The more pain, the more he likes it: “…he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected ‘Nevermore’ the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow.”

Then, just when we think it’s all over, Poe drives in the dagger.

In the last stanza, he changes the tense from past to present, from a night in the past (“.. it was a night in bleak December”) to the horrifying present. The narrator hasn’t been remembering a quaint evening of yore, but is reporting from right now and … the raven is still there. We have no idea of how much time has passed, but we get the idea it is considerable because the narrator says “still” twice. There are no more whiffs of invisible angels, only the glare of a demon’s eye:

“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,”

The bird, we know now, will never leave. There is no balm in Gilead. There is no escape from grief. The last use of the word “Nevermore,” Poe wrote, “should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair.”

Poster promoting a 1908 play of “The Raven” by George Hazelton. Print: U.S. Lithograph Co. Prints and Photographs Division.

Virigina died two years and one day after “The Raven” was published. While her corpse lay on the deathbed, Poe had an artist paint her portrait. It is the only image of her known to still exist.

In life, as in “The Raven,” Poe never seemed to fully escape his grief. He was sometimes found after dark in the years to come, sitting beside her grave. His last completed poem was “Annabel Lee,” in which the unnamed narrator is haunted, much like the protagonist of “The Raven,” by the death of his beautiful young love. At the poem’s conclusion, the narrator pictures climbing into the tomb with her corpse:

“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea,
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

Autumn is Poe’s season, the time of year when his dark, dazzling works seem to most come to life. Halloween still seems like a holiday he would have created if hadn’t already existed; the long night, the ghosts, the fears of The Thing in the Dark. And finally, there is the everlasting sense of horror from the last lines of “The Raven” — there will never be any solace from the grave; only the dark, deep, terrible silence.

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Finding Latinos in Film

In his epic “El Norte,” award-winning filmmaker Gregory Nava charted the tragic journey of siblings Enrique and Rosa from Guatemala to Los Angeles in pursuit of the American dream. The film’s themes still resonate in this Hispanic Heritage Month four decades later.

“El Norte,” released in 1983, was inducted into the Library’s National Film Registry in 1995. It offers a heart-wrenching portrayal of the immigrant experience; today, it is considered an important landmark in Latino cinema and American independent film.

Born in San Diego, Nava has intimate knowledge of the border and its people — growing up, he had family on both sides. As a filmmaker, he wants to ensure that Latinos are seen, beyond stereotypes, for their vast cultural complexity.

Latinos make up about 20% of the U.S. population but only 2% of actors in movies. But, Nava says, advancing true Latino inclusion in film is not just a math challenge.

Numbers are important, he said in an interview, but it’s more important that Latinos are creating Latino stories and acting in lead roles: “We’re writing our stories, directing our stories, telling who we are for this country and for our industry.”

Nava’s work is included in a Library research guide prepared last year by junior fellows Mateo Arango, Karla Camacho and Madeline Griffin and project mentor María Daniela Thurber of the Latin American, Caribbean and European Division in collaboration with experts from the Library’s Moving Image Research Center and its National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

The guide features thematic and chronological filmographies from 1893 through 2023, documentaries, books, posters and external websites curated to increase understanding of Latino film. It also features interviews with filmmakers like Alexis C. Garcia, Aitch Alberto, Alejandra Vasquez, Patricia Cardoso and Alex Rivera.

In addition to “El Norte,” Nava’s “Selena” and Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit,” also featured in the guide, have been inducted into the Film Registry, which includes 22 films with significant Latino representation on and off camera.

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The Great Pyramid of Pei

Paris is a tribute to centuries of French architects. The Gothic towers of Notre Dame, limestone domes of Sacré-Cœur, iron latticework of the Eiffel Tower and golden dome of Les Invalides visually define one of the world’s great cityscapes.

To those, add the glass-and-metal pyramid of a Chinese American who brought an ancient Egyptian form — and a controversy — to the historic city’s heart.

In 1983, architect I.M. Pei was commissioned to devise a solution to a growing problem: the outdated entrance to the massive, magnificent Louvre museum no longer could accommodate increasing throngs of visitors.

Pei proposed an audacious remedy: Dig out the central courtyard and build a massive subterranean hall that would give visitors easy access to the museum’s three wings and also create space for shops, restaurants and other facilities.

Above the hall would loom the new entrance: a 71-foot-high glass pyramid through which visitors and light would flood into the below-ground spaces.

Pei’s sketch shows the axes of the Louvre courtyard. From this, he determined the center of his pyramid by connecting the site to the Arc de Triomphe, 2 miles away through the open end of the courtyard. Prints and Photographs Division.

The intrusion of modern materials and ancient Egyptian form among the historical structures — the Louvre is a former royal palace — set off a controversy dubbed the “Battle of the Pyramid.” Was the great pyramid of Pei an anachronistic blot on a revered cityscape or an inspired, ingenious solution blending artfully into its setting?

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division holds original models and site plan sketches by Pei that give a sense of his thinking and process. In addition, the Manuscript Division holds Pei’s papers — some 180,000 items of correspondence, proposals, scrapbooks and more.

“You are never sure about these things until they are built,” Pei said at the opening of the new Louvre entrance in 1989.

One never is: A committee of prominent artists once objected to plans for the Eiffel Tower, calling it “useless and monstrous,” a “hateful column of bolted sheet metal.” As with the Eiffel, controversy over Pei’s pyramid faded into the past, leaving another monument to human imagination in a city renowned for them.

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Ada Limón & Poetry in the National Parks!

—This is a guest post by Rob Casper, head of poetry and literature in the Literary Initiatives Office. 

Ada Limón spent her summer as many Americans do — visiting some of the country’s spectacular national parks. The U.S. poet laureate, however, visited with a special purpose: to kick off her signature project, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Parks,” connecting poetry to nature.

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world,” Limón said of the project. “Poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature — of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”

Limón’s initiative consists of promoting poetry through visits to national parks as well as an anthology of new nature poems.

This summer, Limón visited five National Park Service units across the country — Cape Cod National Seashore, Mount Rainier, Redwood, Cuyahoga Valley and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. At each, she revealed poetry installations in cooperation with the Poetry Society of America and the National Park Service. The initiative concludes with visits to Everglades National Park in October and Saguaro National Park in December.

At the entrance to the Beech Forest trail at Cape Cod, visitors encountered a picnic table covered in black cloth, facing picturesque Beech Forest Pond. Limón read “Can You Imagine?” by Mary Oliver.  It begins:

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking

After reading the concluding lines, Limón then stepped to the table. Pulling back the cloth, she revealed “Can You Imagine?” printed on a powder-coated aluminum panel.

Afterward, a park ranger led a guided tour of the trail, read other poems by Oliver along the way and spoke about her life. One of the country’s most popular and celebrated poets, Oliver spent over 50 years in the area and often walked the trail herself. Her papers are now in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

Returning to the table after the tour, Limón pulled out her notebook and tried her hand at the initiative’s prompt: What would you write in response to the landscape around you? She’s encouraging readers to share their responses using the hashtag #YouAreHerePoetry.

A park ranger looks out at Mt. Rainier while seated at a picnic table emblazoned with one of the “You Are Here” poems. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The aptly named Paradise location at Mount Rainier National Park, at 5,500 feet, offered a spectacular setting of snow-covered mountains for Limón to discuss the poem she chose for the park, “Uppermost” by A. R. Ammons. Later, at the reveal of a picnic table emblazoned with the poem, she called up a special guest to join her: her brother, Bryce Limón, who worked as a ranger at Rainier from 2011 to 2014.

Two days later, Limón arrived at Redwoods National and State Parks. While there, the traveling party stopped to see some of the park’s famed big trees along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway. Later, at the Crescent Beach day use area, morning fog gave way to sun and breezes, perfect for an extended reading.

Limón finished the reading with commissioned poems she wrote for NASA and the National Climate Assessment, followed by the poem “Redwoods” by Dorianne Laux in the “You Are Here” anthology. She also read the featured poem for the park: “Never Alone” by Francisco X. Alarcón.

The next day, she traveled to her childhood home near Sonoma, California — a home she recently purchased.

In her backyard, in the beautiful California sunshine, Limón pointed out the lemon tree she planted as a child — a perfect example of how the project connects to her own life in the most personal of ways, as the natural world does to us all.

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Richard Morris Hunt: Architect of the Gilded Age

— This is a guest post by Susan Reyburn, a writer-editor in the Publishing Office. It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Who was Richard Morris Hunt, and why was he so famous? Why was he forgotten, even as images of his creations continued to illuminate hefty coffee table books and characters on HBO’s “The Gilded Age” referred to him by name?

For impossibly wealthy industrialists, Hunt was the architect of choice in building, furnishing and decorating mansions that combined Old World aesthetics with American ingenuity and spirit. For millions of poor European immigrants, his work was among the first things they saw on approaching New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty standing atop the monumental pedestal he designed.

The grand salon in The Marble House, Newport. Photo: Michael Froio.

Some of those new arrivals, as domestic servants, would become very familiar with Hunt’s floorplans as they hurried up and down hidden back stairs. Others might eventually have lived in one of his apartment buildings or his retirement home for “respectable aged and indigent females.”

“When viewed as a cultural leader, Hunt emerges as astonishingly relevant to the critical assessment of America’s ‘master narrative,’ ” writes historian Sam Watters in his new book, “The Gilded Life of Richard Morris Hunt: Architecture & Art for an American Civilization,”  just published by Giles Ltd. in association with the Library. “Tourists may not know his name, but they experience the buildings and art that he and his colleagues and patrons conceived and collected to build an American civilization. Their museums, libraries, and mansions extended what President Lincoln, on the verge of the Civil War, called ‘our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes.’ ”

A native of Brattleboro, Vermont, and the son of a U.S. congressman, Hunt was born in 1827. He descended from Revolutionary War patriots and ascended to the highest ranks of his profession. His widowed mother, Jane M. Leavitt Hunt, ferried her five children to Europe in 1843, calling the endeavor “venturesome in the extreme,” and an opportunity for advanced schooling that was not yet available in the United States, especially in the arts.

Hunt’s 1852 drawing of a Venetian palazzo. Prints and Photographs Division.

The young Hunt became the first American to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, becoming a construction inspector at the Louvre and taking extensive sketching trips through Europe and the Middle East.

With Yankee bona fides and European training, he returned to the United States in 1855, then in his late twenties, determined to spread the Beaux-Arts gospel and give America architecture that matched its ambitions. But Hunt also was practical, tending to the wishes of his often-demanding clientele and telling his son, “If they want you to build a house upside down standing on a chimney, it’s up to you to do it.”

None other than Ralph Waldo Emerson cited Hunt and his brothers William, a leading painter, and legal scholar Leavitt as representing a remarkable American family. The sage of Concord might have been further impressed had he met the other siblings — Jonathan, a physician dedicated to working with the poor, and Jane, also an accomplished artist.

The main hall of Ochre Court in Newport, with its “Feast of the Gods” mural. It’s now the main adminstration building at Salve Regina University. Photo: Michael Froio.

He regarded Richard as a “thinking soul … horsed on a robust & vivacious temperament” who “expressed with the vigor & fury … fine theories of the possibilities of art.” Emerson soon added Richard to his short list of men who were making major contributions to the young nation’s progress, among them naturalist John Muir and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

The best-known surviving works on Hunt’s lengthy resume include the Fifth Avenue main entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Breakers and Marble House mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, and Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina. In addition to his residential castles for Vanderbilts and Astors, his range was extraordinary, from early apartment buildings and skyscrapers to modern hospitals, university facilities and churches.

But Hunt built more than buildings: He was essential in developing the nascent American architectural field as a profession, with established standards, business practices and training curricula. As a plaintiff in an 1861 lawsuit, Hunt successfully argued that clients pay professional architects fees for their creative and conceptional work, elevating the role of the architect above that of traditional builders and construction supervisors.

His technical innovations included the use of lightweight terracotta hollow block floor construction and enclosed iron vertical supports to improve fireproofing. Hunt’s office also mastered the art of magnificent presentation drawings, encouraging clients to see what was possible in the hands of a cultured architect.

As well-travelled, well-educated, self-appointed arbiters of good taste, Hunt and his circle took it upon themselves to instruct the public in what was beautiful and important.

He co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Institute of Architects — he later served as its president — and the Municipal Art Society. Unusual among architects, Hunt encouraged his clients to acquire and later bequeath art collections to institutions for safekeeping and exhibition, making them accessible to the public.

Another of Hunt’s designs: A women’s dormitory at Hampton University, now known as Virginia-Cleveland Hall. Photo: Michael Froio.

His contemporaries regarded him as the dean of American architecture; even with some critical failures and lost commissions, his was a stellar 40-year career, bolstered by his gift for self-promotion and mentoring successful young successors. Not long after he was memorialized in granite and bronze off Fifth Avenue in Central Park, Hunt’s work was overtaken by modernism. He disappeared from the national conversation on art and culture that he had so fervently helped to create.

It was Hunt’s robust interdisciplinary range that first intrigued Watters.

Ford Peatross, the founding director of the Center for Architecture, Design, and Engineering at the Library, tipped him off to the richness of the Richard Morris Hunt Collection when it was acquired in 2010.

Peatross suggested Watters might write about and catalog the material as he had done with the collection of pioneering photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston. Watters was further drawn to “Hunt’s astounding range of art-related activities — architect, collector, educator — in diverse social settings, all to the end of building a ‘civilized’ America,” and he plunged into the deep end of Huntiana. Fortunately, Mari Nakahara, Peatross’ eventual successor, was already there.

Nakahara knew the Hunt holdings well, having worked with the material when it was housed at the Octagon, the museum of the American Architectural Foundation, in Washington, D.C., before the collection came to the Library.

Hunt’s 1893 design of the administration building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Prints and Photographs Division.

Watters and Nakahara worked their way through Hunt’s well-preserved archive of more than 10,000 items, including an unpublished biography by his wife, Catharine Howland Hunt; numerous sketchbooks; architectural drawings from his student days to his decades as head of his own firm; notable photography from the United States and abroad; scrapbooks that he and Catharine assembled filled with reference images; and his library of architecture books, with some French and Italian tomes dating to the 17th century.

“People may not know that the Library collects architectural materials,” says Nakahara, who is especially partial to Hunt’s 1847 iron bridge drawing from his days at the École. “The Prints and Photographs Division holds over 4 million items in about 140 collections related to architecture, design and engineering. The easiest way to study and enjoy our collection is via our research guide.  In this digital era, though, people believe everything is available online, but that is not true. I strongly recommend that people see the originals.”

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Louis Bayard’s Novel Research at the Library

Bestselling author Louis Bayard has written nine historical novels over the past two decades and has researched them all at the Library, poring over maps, sorting through personal love letters, consulting societal details of the lost worlds that he brings to life.

His latest novel, “The Wildes,” a fictionalized account of Oscar Wilde and his wife and children, was released this week. His penchant of weaving real people (Wilde, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, etc.) into fictional adventures is so distinctive that The New York Times recently referred to it as “Bayardian.”

Creating a distinctive literary style over two decades — with books set across several centuries and three continents — takes a lot of work. A lot of that gets done in the Library’s stacks, reading rooms and collections, spread across three buildings on Capitol Hill. He’s on the Library campus so often that he has his own researcher shelf (#1433) in the stacks just off the Main Reading Room. He has lauded Abby Yochelson, a now-retired reference specialist in English and American literature, in the acknowledgements of several books as his “research angel.”

“It just makes you feel more secure when you’re putting these worlds together because they’re all lost to time,” he says during a recent interview at a Capitol Hill restaurant a few doors down from the Library. “I’m trying to reanimate them, and the only way to do that is through books, through the stacks.” A moment later, he adds: “The book is always telling me what I still need to know. It’s often considerable. That’s when I dash back to the Library.”

Louis Bayard researched the life, and particularly the trial, of Oscar Wilde, at the Library. Above: Wilde in 1882. Photo: Napoleon Sarony. Prints and Photographs Division.

Bayard is 60 and comes across much like his books do: urbane, witty, charming. He was born in New Mexico, grew up in Northern Virginia and went to college at Princeton. He got a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and moved back to Washington, where he soon worked as a staffer for congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and for U.S. Rep. Philip Sharp (D-Ind.).

His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, he’s served as chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and taught at George Washington University. He often writes about pop culture for major newspapers and magazines. The father of two sons, he lives with his husband, Don Montuori, on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from the Library.

He’s also settled into a professional routine — a book about every two years — and a consistent research method. Once he’s settled on a new character storyline, he heads to the Library’s website and on-site resources and starts digging.

Let’s look back at the beginning to see how he got here.

By his late 30s, he’d written two contemporary novels that were perfectly fine but didn’t catch on. He struck out on a new tack with the idea of writing a historical thriller, following the fictional Timothy Cratchit (Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) into adulthood. Bayard pictured him in London’s seamy 1860s underbelly, where he stumbles across the bodies of two dead young women, each of whom has been branded with the same mark.

But how was one to fill out nearly 400 pages with those “teeming markets, shadowy passageways and rolling brown fog” of the London demimonde, as “Mr. Timothy’s” dust jacket would ultimately promise?

Bayard, with his journalism background, went to the Library to do his due diligence. He at first found the place confusing if not bewildering. The Library is filled with collections from different eras — it’s not like Google — and some parts of a single subject might be found in contemporary books, or maybe in personal letters of participants, others in histories published decades (or centuries) later and still more in maps or in long-forgotten newspapers and magazines. These can be in different divisions and sometimes in different buildings. They have come in over nearly two centuries and might have been cataloged in ways that would have made perfect sense in 1890 but not so much so in 1990. Some were online, some were not.

This is when he met Yochelson, a highly respected research librarian.

“It wasn’t an easy process to figure out,” he says, “and I needed my friend Abby to practically hold my hand. But once I was in, I found Henry Mayhew, who was this amazing social scientist who was basically walking through the streets of London in the Victorian era and taking notes about everything he saw, the statistics, man-on-the-street interviews, everything. It was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve found the treasure trove. I’ve found gold.’ ”

The book sold well and drew strong critical reviews, and Yochelson was delighted to see some of the research she helped him find turn up in the book.

“I still remember he wanted to know what banking was like in Charles Dickens’ England,” she said in a recent phone call. “ ‘Would you get a check? What was a photography studio like?’ All sorts of things. Two years later, the book comes out and I would come across something and go, “Oh, there it is!”

She and Bayard have kept up their friendship, though she is modest about her help. “There are ‘research angels’ all over the library,” she says.

This 1830 map of West Point shows an icehouse at the top center, identified by an “I.” It gave author Louis Bayard the idea for a key plot point in “The Pale Blue Eye.” Geography and Map Division.

Research magic struck again for his next book, “The Pale Blue Eye,” set at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, in 1830, when a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe becomes caught up in a grisly murder mystery. (Poe really did attend the academy.) In the Geography and Map Division, Bayard came across a layout of the campus that showed, right in the middle, an icehouse. He made a copy of the map, kept it with him while writing to ensure accuracy and made the icehouse the central focus of the investigation.

That book did even better and was turned into a 2022 film starring Christian Bale.

In researching “Roosevelt’s Beast,” a tale about supernatural evil in the Amazon rainforest that has devastating effects on Kermit Roosevelt, the president’s son, he came across love letters in the Manuscript Division between Kermit and his fiancé, Belle Wyatt Willard. They were so touching that he used excerpts verbatim in the book.

“What have I done that God should choose me out of all the world for you to love — but as He has done this, so perhaps He will make me a little worthy of your love,” Willard wrote, in one passage Bayard quoted. “May He keep you safe for me! I love you, Kermit, I love you.”

“…I think it must be my soul going out across the world to you Beloved — to tell you how I love you — Good Night — Belle.” One of Belle Willard’s love letters to Kermit Roosevelt in 1914. Manuscript Division.

One hundred and ten years later, you can still hold the hotel stationery on which she wrote, see how delicately she pressed the pen into the paper. The passion, the intensity, the intimacy of her writing — it really does bring goosebumps.

It’s that kind of immediacy, Bayard says, that brings his lost worlds to life, that brings modern readers the touch of lives long gone.

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Ralph Ellison, Photographer

—This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

Ralph Ellison, author of the award-winning 1952 novel “Invisible Man” and the posthumously published “Juneteenth,” long has been celebrated as a writer, teacher and consummate cultural critic of jazz, African American literature and the blues.

But Ellison was a polymath, possessed of a wide range of interests and talents. He studied music at Tuskegee, apprenticed in sculpture as a young newcomer to New York and gathered street game lyrics from children in Harlem for the Federal Writers’ Project. He loved technology and design — and he was an accomplished photographer.

For a brief time before the success of “Invisible Man,” Ellison earned money as a freelance photographer. He took portraits for publishers and covered events for newspapers, from car accidents to dog shows. He continued to work artistically, documenting everyday pursuits and beauties of Manhattan life. He collaborated with Gordon Parks and shot images of literary friends like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He created intimate portraits of his wife, Fanny Ellison, and images of African Americans shopping and gathering together. He took pictures of children in the parks and on street corners.

Fanny Ellison poses for a fashion shot. Photo: Ralph Ellison. Prints and Photographs Division.

By the 1960s, he was captivated by Polaroids. He made still-life studies of modernist furniture, African artwork, computers, the television, plants and flowers, bookshelves and other objects in his apartment on Riverside Drive.

The Ralph Ellison Papers in the Library’s Manuscript Division contain documentation about his photographic equipment and assignments. Visual holdings in the Ellison collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, meanwhile, include over 23,000 images dating from circa 1930 to 1990 — nearly 300 of which have been digitized and are available online. The 2023 photo book, “Ralph Ellison: Photographer,” drew heavily on this collection.

The collection include pictures of the Ellisons in Manhattan and at their rural Massachusetts home, as well as a myriad of images that reveal to us Ellison’s unique visual conceptions from behind the camera’s eye — proof positive of his artistic imagination.

Ralph Ellison in St. Nicholas Park in New York City around 1950. Photo: Fanny Ellison.

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Inventing the Capitol Building

-This article also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The U.S. Capitol building, the worldwide symbol of American democracy, got its beginnings on a piece of paper on the Caribbean island of Tortola, sketched out by a temperamental doctor in his early 30s.

William Thornton, born in what is now the British Virgin Islands and educated in England and Scotland, immigrated to the U.S. in 1787, became a citizen the next year but soon returned to his native island. In 1792, he belatedly learned of a competition to design the new country’s congressional home.

He worked “day and night” on the drawings and revised them heavily after he got to Philadelphia (then the capital city), and they immediately caught the eye of President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The neoclassical design had sections for the House and Senate on each end connected by a domed rotunda with an impressive portico. Washington loved its “grandeur, simplicity and convenience” and formally approved a further modified design, with a floor plan designed by Stephen Hallet, the only trained architect to have entered the competition, in July 1793.

Detail of the Tortola scheme. Architect: William Thornton. Prints and Photographs Division.

The District of Columbia was a swampy backwater in the 1790s and what is now known as Capitol Hill was a wooded rise, filled with scrub oak. There was no building on the continent that looked remotely like their ambitions.

During construction — which has only seemed to pause during the past 200 years, as the building and grounds are constantly evolving — things changed. The Capitol expanded with the nation, growing from the original bid for a modest 15-room brick building into a complex covering 1.5 million square feet with more than 600 rooms and miles of hallways over a ground area of about 4 acres. The cast-iron dome weighs 8.9 million pounds. It is also a museum of American art and history, with gorgeous tile floors, delicate friezes and masterpieces of painting and statuary.

That construction was like many a Washington project — filled with competing political visions, never-finished ideas, delays, conflicts of interest, hirings, firings, rehirings, egos, a libel suit, cost overruns, disasters and, somehow, stunning success.

“It is America’s greatest building; it is in the monumental and classical tradition of Western art and is among the great symbols of Western civilization,” writes Arthur Ross of The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in the 2005 foreword to “The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration.”

The Library preserves a significant chunk of that history, with personal papers, architectural renderings, plans and drawings. These include not only the papers of Washington and Jefferson, whose architectural ideals shaped the building’s concept, but also an archive of work by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the second architect of the Capitol and responsible for much of its neoclassical design; an archive of Charles Bulfinch, Latrobe’s successor as architect of the Capitol; and an idea book of Constantino Brumidi, whose murals, friezes and frescoes, including the “The Apotheosis of Washington,” fill the building.

The oldest known photograph of the Capitol building, 1846, with its copper-sheathed wooden dome. Photo: John Plumbe. Prints and Photographs Division.

There are also the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, the nation’s preeminent landscape architect of the 19th century who reshaped the Capitol’s wooded grounds into a marvel of beauty; and the papers of Montgomery C. Meigs, a prominent Civil War officer and engineer who oversaw key additions to the Capitol, including its stunning dome. (The Architect of the Capitol, as you might expect, also as vast history of the building.)

These collections are buttressed by foundational items such as the 1792 newspaper ad announcing the design competition that drew Thornton’s entry as well as Thornton’s original “Tortola Scheme”; Washington’s original letter to the commission endorsing it; Pierre L’Enfant’s original 1791 plan of Washington with the site of the Capitol Building; and the first photograph of the Capitol, taken in 1846.

These combine to tell an unlikely story, for there were few architects and craftsmen in the young nation, none of the original commissioners overseeing the project had qualifications for the work and there was little funding. Thornton and Latrobe, the first two architects of the Capitol, insulted one another so viciously that Latrobe successfully sued Thornton for libel.

“Few buildings have begun under less favorable circumstance, and fewer still enjoy greater architectural success,” writes William C. Allen in “History of the United States Capitol,” a 2001 government publication.

The eye of the Rotunda. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Principal construction dragged on for decades. The Capitol was burned by the British in 1814, and another fire in 1851 destroyed much of the Library of Congress (then housed in the Capitol). Dozens of workaday ovens were installed during the Civil War to help feed Union troops who were camped nearby. It was only that war that brought an end to using enslaved workers to build the “temple to democracy.”

One of those workers was Philip Reid, an enslaved man who in 1860 played a key role in casting the Statue of Freedom that crowns the dome. Then in his 40s, he was a free man by the time it was raised in 1863.

The Statue of Freedom, down from its spot atop the Capitol Dome for repairs. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

From the statue’s vantage point nearly 300 feet above the city, workers who put it in place would have seen the Anacostia and Potomac rivers slicing around L’Enfant’s planned city and the expanse of the country spreading beyond the western horizon.

So much of the nation’s history had yet to be written, and the building that would become its symbol was, like the rest of the nation, still growing.

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Laundromats, Refugee Camps and Other LOC Literacy Winners

The Library’s 2024 Literacy Awards recognized four top honorees from around the world for their work in promoting a love of reading, language preservation and literacy lessons in refugee camps, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said yesterday on International Literacy Day.

The year’s awards recognize work in six countries and in more than a dozen spots across the United States, showcasing the Library’s annual recognition of literacy efforts. In addition to the four top prizes, worth a combined $350,000, another 20 organizations were recognized for their work with smaller awards.

“I am encouraged by the work that this year’s winners and honorees have accomplished in helping people of all ages not only learn to read in a primary or secondary language, but also in inspiring communities to enjoy the practice of reading,” Hayden said.

The LaundryCares Foundation received the Literacy Awards top prize. Photo: LaundryCares Foundation.

The program’s $150,000 top award, the David M. Rubenstein Prize, went to the LaundryCares Foundation, an Illinois-based non-profit that has transformed hundreds of laundromats across the United States into learning spaces that encourage reading for children and families.

“This prestigious distinction will be a game changer for us and help us reach more children through our everyday spaces and places,” said Liz McChesney, the early childhood partnerships and community engagement director of LaundryCares.

The foundation was established in 2006 by the Coin Laundry Association in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a means of helping under-served communities in the New Orleans area, in particular with providing spaces for children to read and learn. The effort now has some 250 laundromats across the country participating in their Family Read, Play, & Learn program. McChesney, the former director of children’s services at the Chicago Public Library, co-authored an article (“Soap, Suds, and Stories”) about the program in a journal of the American Library Association in 2020.

On the other side of the world in New Zealand, Te Rūnanga Nui o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori Inc., a network of schools, was awarded the inaugural $100,000 Kislak Family Foundation Prize for their work in preserving and promoting the Māori language, which was recently under the threat of extinction.    

“This recognition underscores the transformative power of indigenous language, not just as a tool for education and literacy but as a means of intergenerational transmission that ensures our culture thrives across generations,” said Hohepa Campbell, chief executive officer of TRNKKM. TRNKKM’s work was recognized for having an outsized impact on Native language revitalization efforts in indigenous communities worldwide.

Just outside D.C., We Need Diverse Books in Bethesda, Maryland, received the $50,000 American Prize for supporting authors and illustrators with diverse backgrounds and helping them get their books published. “Imagine a world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book,” reads the front page of their website, summarizing their mission.

Finally, the Alsama Project in Beirut, Lebanon, received the $50,000 International Prize for implementing an effective curriculum that condenses 12 years of standard schooling into half that time and empowering Syrian refugee youth who are often left out of Lebanese schools due to low literacy skills.

The Library’s Literacy Awards Program, established in 2013 with Rubenstein’s support (and bolstered by the Kislak Family Foundation in 2023) has awarded 223 prizes, totaling more than $3.8 million. More than 200 organizations from 40 countries have been recognized for their work.

Nonprofit organizations, schools, libraries, and literacy initiatives from across the country and around the world apply for the awards every January. The 15-member Literacy Awards Advisory Board then reviews the applications before Hayden makes the final decisions.

This year’s other international honorees were in Afghanistan, Norway, Pakistan and Poland. There were 14 other U.S. honorees, ranging from locally focused efforts to nationwide campaigns.

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Postcards from America

This is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division. It also appears in the July-August issue of Library of Congress Magazine.

Greetings from Washington, D.C.!

And from Gordon, Nebraska; Black River Falls, Wisconsin; San Francisco, California; and countless other big cities and tiny hamlets spread across the vastness of the United States.

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division recently placed online more than 8,000 “real photo” postcards from the early 1900s — cards that preserve images of life as it existed in turn-of-the-century America.

Let’s hope he doesn’t see a squirrel…a 1911 gag postcard photo. Prints and Photographs Division.

The production and use of postcards exploded in the United States after a federal law, passed in 1907, allowed for messages to be written on the backs of the cards along with the addresses. Previously, postcards were widely used, but messages could only be added to the fronts of cards, which detracted from the images.

At a time when relatively few households had a telephone, postcards provided quick and convenient communication. Many people also collected cards as souvenirs in albums.

Large companies fed this new market with millions of cards featuring popular landmarks and tourist sites, humorous pictures, holiday greetings and advertisements. Local photographers participated in the craze by printing their negatives on a photographic card stock, typically 31/2 by 51/2 inches in size. The Library’s postcard holdings are vast.

Dome Rock in Gering, Nebraska, in 1908. Photo: S.D. Buther and Son. Prints and Photographs Division.

Their images show an America hard at work and play, and the country’s innate sense of humor. In South Dakota, men top off a giant haystack. A boy rides an enormous prize rooster at the Minnesota State Fair. In Olustee, Oklahoma, a couple poses in the back seat of their Overland automobile, their dog in the driver’s seat, paws on wheel.

And they show an America moving ahead into a new, modern era: A biplane flies down Main Street in Mayville, Wisconsin; an 1913 illustrated card calls for votes for women.

A 1913 postcard advocating for womens right to vote. Prints and Photographs Division.

When photographers expected large sales for a card, they could deposit a copy of the card for copyright protection. The Prints and Photographs Division now preserves thousands of those copyright deposit postcards.

The Collections Digitization Division scanned all the cards in 2023, fronts and backs — now all waiting online to be explored.

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