Library of Congress's Blog, page 29

Library Literacy Awards

This guest post was written by Judith Lee, Library of  Congress Literacy Awards Program Manager.

September is an exciting month. Teachers, students, and parents alike adjust to the new school year, shorts and sandals get tucked away, and the words “warm” and “cozy” return. And on September 8, International Literacy Day, we are thrilled to announce the 2022 Literacy Awards winners and honorees!

Based on recommendations from members of the Literacy Awards Advisory Board, Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden has selected three top winners and 12 Successful Practices Honorees for this year. These awards are made possible through the generosity of philanthropist David M. Rubenstein.

2022 Literacy Award Winners

This year’s top prize, the David M. Rubenstein Prize ($150,000) is awarded to Street Child. Founded in 2008, Street Child is a UK-based international charity currently operating in 20 of the world’s most vulnerable countries. Its programs have meaningfully transformed educational opportunities for over half a million children, often through the help of local partnerships and within the context of post-emergency response. Street Child uses evidence-based pedagogical methods while keeping costs low. The organization believes that all children should be in school, safe, and learning. With the David M. Rubenstein Prize, the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program recognizes Street Child’s outstanding and measurable contribution to increasing literacy levels in multiple parts of the world.

The American Prize ($50,000) is awarded to Make Way for Books. Established in 1998, Make Way for Books provides early literacy programming to young children and their families who may not otherwise have access to books or quality early education in southern and central Arizona. The organization’s two-generation approach builds skills in both young children (ages birth to 5) and their caregivers. Make Way for Books is bilingual in content, culturally sensitive in methodology, and representatively diverse in staffing. The program is well-established, highly regarded, and growing. It serves 25 school districts and close to 18,000 young children. The Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program recognizes Make Way for Books for its significant and measurable contribution to increasing literacy levels in the United States.

The International Prize ($50,000) is awarded to Young African Refugees for International Development (YARID). Founded in 2007, YARID is an educational nonprofit based in Kampala, Uganda. YARID  was established by Congolese refugees who formed connections with fellow refugees and local Ugandan youth through football games. Using sports as an initial and strategic unifier, the participating refugees soon realized they needed a common language in order to communicate with one another and began offering English literacy classes. This initiative encouraged participants to seek and gain employment opportunities. YARID’s target audience grew from 30 young refugees in its first year to now nearly 5,000 learners. The Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program recognizes YARID’s significant and measurable contribution to increasing literacy levels in Uganda.

2022 Successful Practices Honorees

In addition to our top three winners, the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program recognizes 12 organizations for their successful implementation of a specific literacy practice. Together, this year’s Successful Practices Honorees are empowering adults in the United States, engaging local communities, promoting a culture of reading in schools and at home, and nurturing partnerships to have a broader effect on reducing illiteracy in the United States and abroad. This year’s Successful Practices Honorees are:

Concern Worldwide, Niamey, NigerDIBS for Kids, Omaha, NebraskaDominican Republic Education and Mentoring (DREAM) Project, Milton, Vermont (operating in the Dominican Republic)Impact Network International, Brooklyn, New York (operating in Zambia)International Literacy and Development (ILAD), Duncanville, TexasKids Read Now, Troy, OhioLiteracy Achieves, Dallas, TexasLiteracy Action, Atlanta, GeorgiaLiteracy Network, Madison, WisconsinReadWorks, Brooklyn, New YorkServeMinnesota (Reading Corps), Minneapolis, MinnesotaWorld Education, Boston, Massachusetts (operating in the United States, Africa, and Asia)

Finally, we want to thank all of this year’s applicants for their commitment to combating illiteracy and promoting reading both in the United States and abroad.

About the Awards

Through the generosity of philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program honors nonprofit organizations that have made outstanding contributions to increasing literacy in the United States or abroad. The awards also encourage the continuing development of successful methods for promoting literacy and the wide dissemination of the most effective practices. They are intended to draw public attention to the importance of literacy, and the need to promote literacy and encourage reading.

2022 marks the tenth year that the Literacy Awards Program has recognized organizations for their outstanding achievements in advancing literacy. Over the past decade, this program has awarded more than $3 million in prizes to over 150 institutions working in 38 countries. We invite you to check out this interactive map for a visual summary all of the organizations that have been awarded or honored by Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program over the past ten years.

National Book Festival: Thousands Spent the Holiday with a Good Book

Janelle Monáe spoke to a packed room on the NBF’s main stage. Photo Shawn Miller.

Reading is often a solitary pursuit, yet books can bring us together —many thousands of us, in fact, if Saturday’s joyous National Book Festival is any measure.

“It’s wonderful to be back at the Washington Convention Center in person and to see all of these smiling faces,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said to cheers as she opened the festival on the main stage.

It was the Library’s first in-person festival since the pandemic forced writers and readers into their separate spaces. The crowds, the energy and the buzz mirrored the festival’s theme — literally, that books bring us together.

As festivalgoers entered the convention center, purple-T-shirted volunteers greeted them with a friendly “Welcome back!” (For the past two years, the festival had been online, as much of D.C. was shut down due to the pandemic.) At a central information booth, they picked up printed programs, posters and C-SPAN book bags, a perennial favorite bit of swag.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Maraniss, music sensation Janelle Monáe, Instagram star Leslie Jordan and disability advocate Nyle DiMarco to civil rights legend Ruby Bridges, Hayden promised something for just about everyone. “It’s gonna be a fantastic day!”

Following Hayden, actor turned bestselling author Nick Offerman delighted fans in a conversation with National Park Service ranger Millie Jimenez about his latest book, “Where the Deer and Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.”

NPS ranger Millie Jimenez and Nick Offerman delighted the crowd. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Offerman was one of more than 100 authors who appeared on 11 festival stages. They hailed from 25 states and the District of Columbia; they ranged from Pulitzer Prize winners to debut writers (17 of them); and, over the past year, they wrote fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s literature reflecting the “diversity of readers across our nation,” as Hayden put it.

Some tackled tough subjects (racism, climate change) and explored solutions; others wrote about ways to find joy amid the challenges of modern life. And yet others explored worlds filled with unforgettable characters and dramatic revelations.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Will Bunch addressed debates about higher education, a subject so surrounded by “bad vibes,” he said, that it has become a fault line in American politics.

Some families fret their kids won’t get ahead if they don’t get into the “right” university, while others who can’t afford college or don’t go — nearly half the population, Bunch said — fear that “people think that they’re less worthy, that they lack merit.”

Indeed, fear is the “prevailing attitude around higher education nowadays” Bunch told the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri in a conversation about his new book, “After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It.”

The solution, in Bunch’s view, involves a return to a post-World War II mindset, when the GI Bill made higher education a public good, and support of young people outside traditional universities. “We need to have free trade schools, we need to have internships,” Bunch said.

Many other writers appeared in pairs, trios or even, in the case of “Blackout” on the Main Stage (a celebration of Black teen love), a quintet.

Sessions this year had titles alerting festivalgoers to the subject matter of presentations in case they weren’t familiar with the writers speaking.

Titles included “Heal Thyself?: Mental Illness and Me,” in which Rachel Aviv and Daniel Bergner cited their own experiences (and their respective books) in discussing the limits of modern treatments for mental crises, and “Is Anything Funnier Than Politics?,” in which Susan Coll, Grant Ginder and Xochitl Gonzalez explored the role of secrets in intricate family politics and the way comedy offers an avenue for emotional release in the face of pain.

In “We Knew Them Before They Were Famous,” Louis Bayard and Karen Joy Fowler paired up to talk about their new historical novels — Bayard’s focusing on one of the most beloved figures in American history (Jacqueline Kennedy), and Fowler’s imagining the family of one of the most reviled (John Wilkes Booth).

Bayard’s “Jackie & Me” depicts the relationship that grew between Jackie and Lem Billings, John F. Kennedy’s best friend and a closeted gay man, in the run-up to the Kennedys’ marriage.

Often, queer people have been left out of history, Bayard said. But now, stories such as his are being told about “people who have always been there, just hiding in the corners of their public lives.”

Fowler joked that her Booker Prize-nominated novel, “Booth,” with its exploration of the Lincoln assassin’s eccentric family, shows that “people who don’t murder presidents can be just as interesting as people who do.”

Performances of literary works, new to the festival this year, brought characters from across centuries and worlds to life on two stages.

Crowds streamed in for the first in-person NBF in three years.

On the Pop Lit stage, three actors performed a scene from “The Conjure-Man Dies,” set in an undertaker’s office in Harlem just after a murder. Written by Rudolph Fisher and first published in 1932, “Conjure-Man” was the first full-length mystery novel to feature an all-Black cast of characters, and the Library republished it this spring as part of its Crime Classics series.

In “My Book Is Talking to Me,” three award-winning audiobook narrators from the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled shared secrets of their craft and performed passages from “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen; “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum; and “Passing” by Nella Larsen.

And, surrounded by comfy couches and colorful beanbags on the Please Read Me a Story stage, actors from the group Literature to Life acted out excerpts from “Black Boy” by Richard Wright; “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin; and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz.

Elsewhere, children and families took selfies in front of a Dav Pilkey “Dog Man and Cat Kid” blowup; selected free books at Scholastic’s booth; lined up to spin a colorful wheel for prizes at the Washington Post’s; built electrical circuits at General Motors; and gathered souvenirs from states around the country in the lively Roadmap to Reading area.

Many also learned about the Library. Antonio Parker of the Internship and Fellowship Programs Section said his booth was busy nonstop. Mark Layman of NLS said crowds of kids patiently absorbed themselves in braille coloring by numbers. And Tammy Wong of the Geography and Map Division said a colorful replica map visualizing the texture of the mid-Atlantic ocean floor fascinated dozens of children.

As always, books sales (from Politics and Prose) and signings (managed by the Junior League of Washington) attracted thousands to the expo floor. While waiting in signing lines, festivalgoers could be seen sitting on the floor reading their just-purchased books.

Sahar Kazmi contributed to this story.

The 2022 National Book Festival was made possible by the generous support of private- and public-sector sponsors who share the Library’s commitment to reading and literacy, led by National Book Festival Co-Chair David M. Rubenstein. Sponsors include: Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Washington Post, AARP, General Motors, James Madison Council, John W. Kluge Center, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Scholastic and Sharjah Book Authority. Presenting Partner C-SPAN and Media Partners NPR and El Tiempo Latino.

 

“Blackout” Brings Black Teen Romance to the NBF

“Blackout,” the hit YA romance novel of interlinked stories written by six Black authors, is coming to the National Book Festival’s main stage.

It’s sure to be one of the festival’s highlights, as the event will put five of those authors on one stage: Dhonielle  Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Ashley Woodfolk and Nicola Yoon. They’ll be onstage Saturday, Sept. 3, from 4-5 p.m., and the event will be livestreamed. They’ll be signing books starting at 5:30. (Coauthor Angie Thomas will not be able to join the presentation, alas.)

“Blackout,” set during a power outage in New York, takes readers on a tour of the city and of young Black couples in various stages of romance. All of their stories are interrelated, and they’re all trying to get to a party in Brooklyn. “Even Love Stories Can Glow When the Lights Go” is the book’s tag line and the key to the book’s heartwarming point of view.

The collaboration, born during the pandemic shutdown, is the brainchild of Clayton, an executive at the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books; an author (“Tiny Pretty Things”); and a former librarian (!). She drew in friends and collaborators to tell an upbeat set of stories during a difficult time, picking authors who had a finger on the pulse of Black teens and who each wrote with a unique voice. She wanted the result to be a “celebration.”

“It’s our love letter to Black love, to Black kids and to New York City,” she said. “I wanted to also show them that they are worthy of love no matter what they look like and who they are …. We wanted to write our own love letter to them and say, ‘Hey, your love is valid.’ ”

The result was a bestseller that is now in development for adaptation as a six-part anthology at Netflix, powered by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama. Netflix’s summary: “When the lights go out and people reveal hidden truths, love blossoms, friendships transform, and all possibilities take flight.”

It was so much fun to put together that the group will be back on bookshelves in November with “Whiteout,” another set of linked teen romances, this time set during an Atlanta snowstorm.

Yoon, who has written bestsellers that also were turned into films, such as “Everything Everything” and “The Sun is Also a Star,” said the joint project was a nice break from the solitary experience of a novelist.

“Usually you’re alone in your little cave,” she said. “But I got to write with these women who are so remarkably talented, and we share a point of view of the world, especially on Black love.”

Jackson, born and raised in New York and author of “Allegedly” and “Monday’s Not Coming,” provided some of the city-specific detail that makes the Big Apple seem “magical.”

“It was important for us to hit all the staples where I remember being in love,” she said. “I remember being in love sitting in front of the library. I remember being in love on the subway.”

Those stories and more, coming your way at the NBF.

“The All-Stars of ‘Blackout’ ” will be on the main stage of the National Book Festival Saturday, Sept. 3, from 4-5 p.m. They will each be signing books beginning at 5:30.

Nuyoricans at the National Book Festival: Xochitl Gonzalez and “Olga Dies Dreaming”

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“Olga Dies Dreaming,” one of this year’s breakout popular novels, opens with a great set piece. The titular character, Olga Acevedo, an upscale wedding planner in New York, is sweating the critically important detail of …. napkins. Linen, of course, but the hemstitch border? The color — white, ivory, a touch of blue? How should they be folded? What about — heaven forbid — lint?

And, most delicately: How many hundreds of them can she plausibly over-order, keeping the surplus for a relative’s wedding?

Author Xochitl Gonzalez, who will be at the National Book Festival on Sept. 3, renders this scene with wit and in granular detail, in large part because, like her protagonist, she was a high-end, high-energy wedding planner of Puerto Rican descent in New York for more than a decade.

“The napkins is an absolutely true story,” she laughs in a recent interview. “It was such a perfect way to think about class (divisions).”

The novel starts in 2017 with Olga at 40 — single, child-free, work-obsessed — involved in an icky affair with a wealthy, white multimillionaire nearly 15 years her senior. (She had orchestrated the wedding of his daughter, while he was still married.) And, we learn, extra napkins aren’t the only thing Olga is grifting from her uber-wealthy clients; she’s also hustling liquor with a front for the Russian mafia. This is when she meets Matteo, a mixed-race real estate agent who’s got a certain charm and a furniture-hoarding problem.

Her brother Pedro is the congressman who represents their home district. He cares about their Puerto Rican neighborhood, but as a closeted gay man, finds himself being blackmailed by big-time developers into clearing the way for the neighborhood’s gentrification.

The siblings are close, in part because their parents were socialist revolutionaries who abandoned them as teens. Their mother took off for a clandestine life across the Caribbean and Latin America. Now living in hiding, she sends them haranguing letters about how they are betraying The People. Their father died from AIDS as a drug addict.

It’s an engaging plot energetically told, and it’s no surprise to learn that a one-hour pilot on Hulu was in development even before the book was published in January.

The cover of “Olga Dies Dreaming.”

But, as the pages flip past, the story draws deeper into the well of what the American Dream might actually mean to Caribbean immigrants, their children and the larger society in which they find themselves. There’s also the business of families, secrets and finding oneself in a sea of contradictory social forces, particularly when their mother barrels back in their lives when Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico.

“The real impetus (for the book) was how I’ve always just been raised to be concerned about colonialism and Puerto Rico,” says Gonzalez. “That was always in the background, even when my parents weren’t in the foreground of my life. This was a way to explore a lot of my passions …. In some ways, I say the character of Olga is me without 10 years of therapy.”

The story is tightly autobiographical, Gonzalez says, because she started writing it as a memoir, switching to fiction so she could encompass larger themes and multiple story lines.

Like her heroine, the 45-year-old Gonzalez is a Brooklynite of Puerto Rican descent, was mostly raised by her grandparents and went to public high school but an Ivy League college (Brown, in the author’s case). Both heroine and author are the children of radical socialists who were more bent on world revolution than parenting and were raised by grandparents. (Gonzalez’s mother is Puerto Rican; her father, Mexican.) She was an only child. The closeted brother, she says, is one of the story’s primary fictional additions.

She wound down her wedding-planning business when she turned 40, having an “entrepreneurial heart attack” about wanting to become a writer. She went to work at Hunter College, but wrote fiction from 5 to 7 a.m. with more writing time on the weekends. Several months later, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she wrapped up the first draft of the book. She finished revisions during the pandemic.

The book’s title is a key to its ambitions. It stems from Pedro Pietri’s poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” a foundational document of the Nuyorican movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It relates the bitter reality of Puerto Ricans in New York versus their dreams of American happiness. It tells and retells of the working-class lives and deaths of “Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel,” with one death notice reading “Olga/died dreaming about real jewelry.”

Here’s a bit of the poem’s mood:

“They knew

they were born to weep

and keep the morticians employed

as long as they pledge allegiance

to the flag that wants them destroyed”

Those contrasting forces — to assimilate, to stand free; to cash in, to resist — are the larger forces at work in Olga’s family.

Gonzalez, meanwhile, said she also wanted to preserve the memory of her childhood, of the way things used to be in her hometown.

Being a Nuyorican, she says, is “going extinct because of gentrification. And so in a lot of ways I wanted to pay homage to that …. I really wanted to just sort of put a stamp in the ground about the Brooklyn that I knew, the Nuyorican culture that I loved and was a part of what nurtured me as a kid.… This felt like a way to write a love letter to all those things.”

Xochitl Gonzalez drew on her experience as a wedding planner for key parts of “Olga Dies Dreaming.”

Xochitl Gonzalez will be on the Pop Lit stage for the “ Is There Anything Funnier than Politics? ” panel in Ballroom A from 3:25-4:25 p.m. She will be signing copies of “Olga Dies Dreaming” in line 7 from 5:00-6:00 p.m.

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Just in Time for the National Book Festival, it’s Leslie Jordan!

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Leslie Jordan has been a lot of things over his 67 years – professional horse rider, Emmy Award-winning actor, singer, recovered alcoholic, self-described “Southern Baptist sissy,” Instagram sensation and bestselling author.

The last is what brings him to this year’s National Book Festival, as his “How Y’all Doing? Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well-Lived” has found an audience for his voice on audiobooks and the printed page. (He’ll be interviewed for former “Will & Grace” co-star Megan Mullally.) You can hear his Tennessee twang even if you’re just reading him. The word may be “spectacular,” but he pronounces it (when describing his friends and acting colleagues) “spack-TACK-u-lar” and it just wouldn’t be him if he pronounced it any other way.

He’s joining us today for a video interview from his apartment in West Hollywood on a gorgeous midsummer afternoon. He’s lived in the L.A. area for four decades, longer than he lived in his native Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the accent never left him. It’s a good thing, too, as it’s helped him chart a unique career path, overcoming an agent’s early concern that it would be too limiting. He’s also famously not tall — he stands just shy of 5 feet — and parlayed that, too, into his style. He’s racked up more than 130 television and film credits, often as a supporting actor with the memorable zinger. He starred on “Will & Grace,” for which he won an Emmy, and had several memorable turns on “American Horror Story.” He’s currently starring in “Call Me Kat,” opposite Mayim Bialik.

“How Y’all Doing?” — part memoir, part essay collection — stems from his unlikely late-career success as an Instagram sensation. He started posting at the behest of young television staffers on the show who urged him to “Post that!” when he had a funny line.

Leslie Jordan will be at the National Book Festival on Sept. 3, discussing “How Y’all Doing?”

Then, during the pandemic, isolated at his apartment, he started taping short bits on his phone, staring straight at the camera. They were as simple as they were hilarious.  One after another went viral, until he amassed some 5.8 million followers, most of whom, he says, had no idea he was an actor.

“It’s very young and it’s all female,” he says of his audience. “I don’t have a single man following me … It’s young girls and they just adore me.”

One of his most popular bits was his August 2020 pearl-clutching reaction to a famously profane song by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, the title of which we’ll skip here. It’s 43 seconds of comic perfection. He bops to the music — then realizes the lyrics with a jolt of horror. He puts his hand to his mouth, eyes flying wide open: “Oh lord, oh no no no no!”  He laughs, embarrassed, and stammers, “That’s just shocking,” with all the earnestness of your favorite Southern grandmother.

“Well,” he finally says, primly pursing his lips. “I don’t judge. I guess every garbage can has its lid.”

It has millions of views across several platforms.

“If he’s not the cutest thing on the planet, I don’t even know,” one viewer posted, a comment that itself drew more than 3,000 likes.

Book editors approached him with the book’s concept and title, taking some of his Instagram postings as chapter starters. He did not realize until he sat down to write, he says, that his posts all had a beginning, middle and end, mini-stories just waiting to be fleshed out.

“I wrote every word of it myself and turned it in,” he says. “They couldn’t believe it. No ghostwriter, no anything. I would write in longhand some ideas that I had because I learned that when you put pen to paper, it slows your mind down to the speed of a pen and you get some clarity … it just flowed. It was easy.”

Leslie Jordan in “American Horror Story.”

He’s at his best, perhaps, when talking about growing up in the South, coming of age as a gay kid when that just wasn’t done. He admired two flamboyant gay Southern icons who showed a way to be who he was:  “Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams saved my life.”

When asked about the difficulties of telling his very Baptist mother that he was gay, he tells the story in vintage Leslie Jordan style, his voice rising and falling, stopping and starting, drawing out the vowels as full syllables.

It goes like this:

“So she said to me, she said, ‘You know, Leslie, if you choose this lifestyle, you’re going to be subject to ridicule. And I do not think that I could bear that. And so what my my advice is’  — and then she didn’t pull her Bible out. I thought for sure she’d pull her Bible out —  and she said, ‘No, I want you to live quietly.’ ”

He pauses with a straight face. Then he bursts into an impish smile, waving his hands way above his head, then he’s laughing at how he’s turned out all these years later, as one of the most visibly gay actors in Hollywood:  “Here I am! Whoo-hoo!“

Leslie Jordan cuts up with his “Call Me Kat” co-stars, Vanessa Lachey (l) and Mayim Bialik (r).

Leslie Jordan will be in conversation with Megan Mullally at the National Book Festival on Sept. 3. They will be on the Main Stage from 5:30-6:30 p.m. Jordan will be signing copies of “How Y’all Doing?” in line 12 from 7:00-8:00 p.m.

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25 Years Later, “Tuesdays with Morrie” Still Resonates

Mitch Albom. Photo: Jenny Risher.

Mitch Albom was a top-notch sportswriter three decades ago, thank you very much.

He was an award-winning columnist at the Detroit Free Press, had written a couple of books about Michigan sports figures and was popular on radio and television sports shows. People recognized him in airports. “Hey sports guy!” they’d call out, he remembers, as he hustled to catch a flight, “who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?”

Then he wrote a very short book not about sports. It was called “Tuesdays with Morrie.”

It was a memoir about visiting an old college professor who was dying and the final lessons he imparted. Albom’s book, clocking in at just under 200 pages, hit the bestseller charts … and stayed there for years. It sold more than 17.5 million copies (and still counting). It was translated into dozens of languages. Oprah turned it into a movie.  It became a cultural touchstone about grief and loss.

After that, people in airports stopped asking about football. They said things like, “Hey, my mother died of cancer. The last thing we did before she died was read your book. Can I talk to you?”

“That began to happen to me multiple times a day,” Albom said in a recent interview, now 64 years old and talking from his home in Michigan. “And when I would go out and speak or talk on behalf of the book or whatever, this would happen hundreds of times. I began to hear so many stories of grief and loss and love — and what happens when you lose love. That totally changed my universe.”

Albom will be at the National Book Festival on Sept. 3 in conversation with David M. Rubenstein to discuss the 25th anniversary of the book, his popular faith-based novels and his philanthropic work in Detroit and Haiti. (He’s still a sportswriter, so he’s probably got a good take on this season’s Super Bowl, too.)

The life-changing event in his life didn’t look like that big a deal at the time.

The book began as a simple project: to help his old professor, Morris “Morrie” Schwartz, pay his end-of-life medical bills. Schwartz, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, taught sociology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where a young Albom took his classes and was touched. Years later, Albom saw Schwartz as a guest on “Nightline,” the television news show hosted by Ted Koppel. He was dying of ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

“I just went to visit him because I felt guilty that I hadn’t seen him in 16 years, even though we had been so close,” Albom said. “I … started going every Tuesday and then we started doing this sort of last class and what’s really important in life once you know you’re going to die …. Somewhere during those visits, I found out how in debt he was for his medical bills and that he was going to die and leave an enormous debt. His family was going to possibly have to sell the house just to pay off the bills. And so I got the idea that maybe I could help him pay his bills by writing a book.”

Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995. He was 78.

Albom’s book, subtitled “An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson,” was published in 1997. Though numerous publishers had rejected the project, and it started out with a small print run, it quickly became a publishing juggernaut.

Albom, a New Jersey kid, stayed on in Detroit, adopting the city as his adult home. He’s since published several novels, drawing on faith and inspiration. These have also sold millions of copies. The latest, “The Stranger in the Lifeboat,” was published late last year.

“The Stranger in the Lifeboat,” Mitch Albom’s latest novel.

“I start with the kind of lesson, or the moral thing that I want to explore, and then I create a story around that,” he said. “The characters, the plot all come from the North Star of what point am I kind of trying to make with this book? In “Stranger in the Lifeboat,” the point was about asking for help, which we all do in our own way.”

He still writes his newspaper column, but says the nine charities he runs take up “60 to 70 percent” of his time. He travels monthly to Haiti to help administer the orphanage he took over after the 2010 earthquake.

“People really took to the lessons that Morrie shared with me, because in the end,” he said, “I realize they were far more universal than they were just between Morrie and me.”

Mitch Albom will be at the National Book Festival on the Pop Lit stage Saturday, Sept. 3, at 11:05 a.m. He will be in conversation with David M. Rubenstein. He will sign books in line 7 from 12:30-1:30 p.m.

Tom Thumb’s Wedding Cake…Still at the Library, 159 Years Later

Charles Stratton (“Gen. Tom Thumb”) weds his co-star, Lavinia Warren, in New York in 1863.

The population of New York, the city’s most prominent newspaper opined in February 1863, could be divided into two groups: the lucky few who witnessed the wedding festivities of Charles Stratton … and everyone else.

Stratton, then 25 years old and 35 inches tall, was one of the biggest stars of the mid-19th century. Performing in P.T. Barnum’s shows under the name Gen. Tom Thumb, Stratton enthralled audiences in America and Europe — he appeared before a delighted Queen Victoria — with his song and dance routines and impersonations.

Stratton’s wedding to his slightly smaller co-star, Lavinia Warren, was the event of the season. The city’s elite filled the pews of  the magnificent Grace Church. Outside, thousands filled Broadway or perched on rooftops, hoping for a glimpse of the happy couple.

When the newlyweds moved to the Metropolitan Hotel for the reception, the “breath-expurgating, crinoline-crushing, bunion-pinching mass,” as the New York Times put it, followed — in part because Barnum had sold 5,000 tickets to the event.

At the hotel, the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Stratton greeted guests from atop a piano, surrounded by a motherlode of silver wedding gifts, including a ruby-inlaid miniature horse and chariot specially made by Tiffany’s.

Today, the Library preserves a little slice of that glittering history. In the 1950s, the Manuscript Division acquired a piece of the wedding cake served at the Metropolitan as part of the papers of actress Minnie Maddern Fiske and her husband, Harrison Grey Fiske, the editor of a prominent theater publication.

A slice of wedding cake from the ceremony. Manuscript Division.

Stratton died in 1883, and Lavinia eventually married the equally diminutive Count Primo Magri, who was indeed Italian but not actually nobility. In 1905, Lavinia sent a letter to the Fiskes, accompanied by the slice of cake, hoping they could give her career a boost. “The public are under the impression that I am not living,” she wrote.

Lavinia kept working into her 70s, even appearing with Magri in a silent film, “The Lilliputian’s Courtship,” in 1915. Four years later, she died and was buried beside Stratton beneath a headstone that read simply, “His Wife.”

A century later, that small piece of cake, now dark and moldy, reminds of a bright, glamourous day in the lives of two remarkable people and their city.

Sheet music for “General Tom Thumb’s Grand Wedding March,” by E. Mack. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Hair! At the Library? Yes, and Lots of It

In 1783, James Madison gave a locket with a portrait of himself to a young woman as a token of love and attached this braided lock of his hair to the back. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This story also appears in the July-August 2022 edition of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Of all the strange things in the Library’s collections, the most common strange thing is … hair. Lots of hair.

We have locks of it, tresses, braids, clippings and strands. We have the hair of famous people, not so famous people, and unknown people who sent their hair to someone else.

The Library holds hair from people in the arts such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Walt Whitman and Edna St. Vincent Millay; presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison and Ulysses S. Grant; and any number of famous women, including Lucy Webb Hayes (first lady and spouse of President Rutherford B. Hayes); Confederate spy Antonia Ford Willard; Clare Boothe Luce and unidentified hair from Clara Barton’s diary.

Nearly all of the hair stems from the 18th and 19th centuries, in the era before photographs were common and lockets of hair were seen as tokens that could be anything from romantic to momentous. People might go months or years between seeing one another; a lock of hair was a meaningful talisman.

“It provided a tangible reminder of a loved one,” says Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division who oversees collections with many sets of clippings. “Hair from famous heads might be sought for its historic associations, similar to collecting autographs.”

The Library’s numerous hair samples, spread across multiple divisions, are incidental parts of much larger collections. Exchanging bits of hair was so common that President James A. Garfield kept a circular bit of woven hair sewed onto a small piece of paper, tied with a small green ribbon. A note in the middle reads, “My Compliments,” but there is no identification. Garfield thought it important enough to keep in his diary, so the Library preserves it as part of the historical record.

This small coil contains 26 strands of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven, obtained by an admirer following the composer’s death. Music Division.

Other samples fall into the souvenir category. Admirers cut off much of Beethoven’s after his death in 1827, so much so that a book was written about it in 2000 (title: “Beethoven’s Hair.”) A Leipzig attorney named Eduard Hase obtained a sample, but parceled much of it out to fellow fans. By the time the locks made it to the Library, the coil was just 26 strands.

Madison’s hair, though, is a thick, rich braided sample of chestnut brown. Long before he was president, the frail and delicate Madison (the shortest of all presidents at 5’4”) fell in love with Catherine Floyd, the daughter of a Continental Congress delegate. In 1783, the pair exchanged ivory miniature portraits of one another; Madison tucked a braided bit of his hair into the back of the locket. The courtship didn’t last; the locket did.

The bereaved also held on to hair as relics of their deceased loved ones, particularly during the Civil War. A small case holds a picture of a child named Carl, a locket of his hair and a note from one of his parents: “My beloved son Carl taken from me on April 1, 1865, at age 18, killed at Dinwiddie. Angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Researchers have determined the boy in the photo might be Union soldier Carlos E. Rogers of Company K, 185th New York. He was killed on March 29 or 30, in fight at Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, less than two weeks before the Confederates surrendered.

While parents today would not likely take a bit of hair as a tangible reminder of their lost child, the impulse to hold onto something lost is with us still.

Bereaved parents preserved this lock of hair with a photo of their son, killed in the final weeks of the Civil War. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Lamont Dozier, Legendary Motown Songwriter and National Recording Registry Member, Dies at 81

 

“Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops was inducted into the 2022 National Recording Registry. Graphic: Ashley Jones.

Lamont Dozier, one third of Motown’s key hit-writing team, Holland-Dozier-Holland, has died at 81. It’s difficult to imagine the soundtrack of the 1960s without him. I chatted with him earlier this year, when the trio’s “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” was inducted into the 2022 class of the National Recording Registry. Here’s the story as it appeared in April, and best wishes for the Dozier family.

Lamont Dozier grew up in the last days of Detroit’s Black Bottom, the rough-hewn neighborhood just north of downtown that was adjacent to the jazz clubs and nightlife of the Paradise Valley section of the city.

By the early 1960s, he and his songwriting partners, brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, were in their early 20s. In a furious three-year span, they helped rewrite the city’s history as the home of Motown, the Black-owned record label that reshaped American pop music.

Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, recorded by acts including the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and Martha and the Vandellas, topped the charts and defined the Motown Sound. “Heat Wave,” “Baby Love,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and “This Old Heart of Mine” were just some of the hits they wrote between 1964 and 1966.

“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” inducted into the 2022 class of the Library’s National Recording Registry, was a smash for the Four Tops in 1966. The H-D-H trio wrote it, like their other hits, in an upstairs office at Motown Studios, a converted two-story house on West Grand Boulevard. They worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., much like the auto factory workers in town. About the only thing in the room was a piano.

“It was a fun time, like kids playing in a playground,” Dozier, 80, said recently in a phone interview from his California home. “Everything we touched turned to gold.”

Life certainly didn’t start out that way for Dozier. Like nearly all of his Motown peers, he grew up in racism-based hardship. Blacks had fled the South for better-paying northern manufacturing jobs in the Great Migration during the first decades of the 20th century. But Detroit, among other destinations, proved to be “the promised land that wasn’t,” in the words of Rosa Parks, who fled Alabama for Detroit.

The new arrivals were forced into downtrodden neighborhoods, such as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, where living conditions were segregated and often harsh.

“Whatever you called it, it was the ghetto,” Dozier remembers.

But jazz, the pop music of the day, had created a class of Black musicians who recorded, toured and made good money. In Detroit, Black kids grew up on that music. Many of them, like Dozier, also had relatives who played classical piano. Combined with the gospel played every Sunday in churches, a fusion emerged that would create soul, rhythm and blues and greatly influence rock and roll.

Dozier, who took to the piano after his aunt would come to their house and play Chopin and other classical composers, jumped into the local music scene when he was a teenager. He got his breakthrough from Berry Gordy, another musically minded, ambitious entrepreneur who was a few years older.

Soon after Gordy established Motown, Dozier began teaming with the Holland brothers. He and Brian Holland composed the music, sitting side by side at the piano. Eddie Holland added lyrics. They’d take the results to any number of the acts — many of whom were teenagers — who were constantly flowing through the studios.

They had their first national hit in 1963 with “Heat Wave,” recorded by Martha and the Vandellas. The next year, they emerged from their office with a song called “Where Did Our Love Go.” Dozier had composed it with the Marvelettes in mind, but they turned it down. The Supremes, who did not yet have a hit, reluctantly agreed.

It was not a happy recording session. In a 2020 interview with American Songwriter, Dozier said that he and lead singer Diana Ross were “throwing obscenities back and forth” about the key in which the song was to be recorded, and the other two singers did not like his complex arrangements for the backing vocals. They eventually agreed, he said, to just sing, “baby, baby.”

The song became the Supreme’s first No. 1 hit. (It was inducted into the registry in 2015.) The Supremes would go on to become one of the most successful acts in American music history, with 12 No. 1 songs. H-D-H wrote 10 of them.

Dozier remembers it all now with pride, saying it was remarkable how quickly the songs came to the trio in the little upstairs room.

For “Reach Out,” they were partly inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” in which Dylan half sang, half shouted the title refrain. They put “Reach Out” in the highest reaches of lead singer Levi Stubbs’ range, forcing his vocals to sound rough and urgent. The galloping percussion sound at the beginning of the song, which helped make it so instantly identifiable, came from musician and producer Norman Whitfield hitting a modified plastic tambourine — they removed all the jingles before the recording session.

“Brian and I came up with the melodies on the piano, sitting side by side, he would start ‘danh danh da danh’ and I’d push him over a bit and I’d play the next bar,” Dozier said. “Eddie would listen and get an idea of what should be said. The music and lyrics would come at the same time. The collaboration was something. The energy was just flying around in the room.”

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Remembering Our Friend David McCullough



David McCullough, one of the nation’s most decorated historians and authors, died Sunday at the age of 89 at his Massachusetts home. He was a good friend of American readers and he was a good friend of the Library.

McCullough twice won the Pulitzer Prize and twice won the National Book Award (not to mention the Presidential Medal of Freedom), telling the story of both powerful and ordinary Americans, explaining the nation to itself in a genial and direct tone. He did this both in print, on the stage and on television, a thoughtful, reassuring presence. He was an honorary member of The Madison Council, the Library’s lead donor group, and appeared most recently at the National Book Festival in 2019 (before COVID-19 halted in-person festivals for two years).

“I’m saddened to hear about the passing of the great  historian David McCullough,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. “His dedication in telling this nation’s story taught us more about the American spirit and its value to our collective history. For that we are forever grateful. He truly was an American treasure.”

He was known for his deep research and incisive narratives built on the accumulation of details and the personalities of those he studied — all traits that endeared him to librarians. He won Pulitzers for two presidential biographies: “Truman” in 1992 and “John Adams” in 2001. One of his National Book Award-winning works also focused on the presidency, “Mornings on Horseback: The Story of Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt,” in 1981. The other NBA winner looked at the nation’s ambition and beginning world impact in “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.”

He was popular everywhere he went — several of his books were major bestsellers — and of course he found huge audiences at the NBF. He was at the first NBF and when he was introduced at the 2019 event, the applause went on and on.

In conversation on stage with NBF director Maria Arana, he said that only late in his career had the theme of his work become apparent to him: “I see now that almost all of my books are about Americans who set out to accomplish something worthy that they knew would be difficult and was going to be more difficult even that they expected, and who did not give up and who learned from their mistakes and who eventually achieved what their purpose had been in the first place.”

McCullough was born in Pittsburgh in 1933, had a childhood which he always recalled fondly, and studied literature at Yale. He often had lunch with Thornton Wilder, the playwright and author best known for his timeless “Our Town,”  itself a look at America through a fond but accurate eye. He retuned to his native Pennsylvania for his first book, “The Johnstown Flood,” an account of the 1889 disaster, launching his career from there.

David McCullough at the 2019 National Book Festival. Photo: Shawn Miller.