Library of Congress's Blog, page 30

W.E.B. DuBois and The Brownies’ Book

The March 1920 cover of “The Brownies’ Book.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

—This is a guest post by Rachel Gordon, an educational programs specialist in the Informal Learning Office. It appears in the Library of Congress Magazine and on the Library’s blog for families, Minerva’s Kaleidoscope.

In 2022, the movement for diversity and representation in children’s literature has ensured that more children can see themselves in books and learn about others’ lives, too.

A century ago, things were very different.

Writer, scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois recognized the need for young African Americans to see themselves and their concerns reflected in print. The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for the “Children of the Sun … designed for all children, but especially for ours,” was his response.

Du Bois aimed to instill and reinforce pride in Black youth and to help Black families as they raised children in a segregated and prejudiced world. (The Library has and preserves the Brownies’s Books issues, along with many other Du Bois works and resources; use the two links above for more.)

The Brownies’ Book offered a groundbreaking mix of stories, advice, information and correspondence with the paramount goal of empowering Black children and validating their interests. Content included African folk tales, stories and poems about the origin of different races and messages about self-respect and pride in one’s appearance.

A story  from the Jan. 1920 edition showcased stories of “shining examples” of children’s achievement.

The magazine also asked for “pictures and accounts of the deeds of colored children.” Readers responded enthusiastically — each issue included many photographs of African American youngsters and their activities. There are images of Boy Scouts and Girl Reserve groups, football games, debating teams, dance students, nursing school graduates and more. These must have been a welcome affirmation and validation of readers’ experiences and interests.

After just two years, financial problems ended publication of The Brownies’ Book. Today, some of the language and attitudes seem old-fashioned, and there’s some difficult content. Still, they deliver real insight into the lives and concerns of Black children a hundred years ago.

With the publication of the magazine, Du Bois aimed to create “a thing of Joy and Beauty” — or, as he put it in the dedication of the first issue in January 1920:

“To Children, who with eager look
Scanned vainly library shelf and nook,
For History or Song or Story
That told of Colored People’s glory,
We dedicate THE BROWNIES’ BOOK.”

The Easter 1920 edition of The Brownie’s Book.

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Bill Russell: In His Own Words



Bill Russell, who died Sunday at the age of 88, was a towering figure in American life. Standing, he went 6 feet, 10 inches. In history, he seemed to stride the continent like Paul Bunyan, like John Henry: mythical, impossible, huge.

He won basketball titles everywhere he went — high school, college, the pros, the Olympics — and won them over and over again. His coach, Red Auerbach, summed up his career of 11 NBA titles by describing him as “the single most devastating force in the history of the game.” He was among the first Black superstars in professional sports, encountered racism at a brutish level and, strikingly for the mid-century era, made no attempt to be liked by problematic fans. Woe betide anyone who might have thought of telling William Felton Russell to “shut up and dribble.”

His high-profile civil rights work included, but by no means was limited to, going to Mississippi to work for integration in the wake of the assassination of Medgar Evers and participating in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, who noted that he “stood up for the rights and dignity” of all people.

Russell filmed an unforgettable conversation for the Civil Rights History Project, an oral history production by the Library and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Seattle, Washington, on May 12, 2013. It’s three hours and was conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch (“Parting the Waters”). The pair combined to write Russell’s memoirs, “Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man.”

“I always had the confidence that my mother and father loved me,” he told Branch, right off the bat. “And what they taught me is that if they loved me, I must be OK. So if other people encounter me, and have a problem with me, my father said, then that’s their little red wagon. And so I never worked to be liked because that would be hypocritical to them.”

Bill Russell playing for the Boston Celtics, 1958. Photographer unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

The conversation hadn’t been going for ten minutes when he tells two quick stories about his grandfather, whom he idolized. The man never went to school but was both smart and fearless. Once, his grandfather heard the Klan torturing a black man in the woods one night near his home in Monroe, Louisiana. He loaded a shotgun with cartridges filled with birdseed and fired it into the crowd half a dozen times. The crowd couldn’t find him in the dark and left. His grandfather went home, never checking on the victim.

The second story was about a white lumber store owner who took his grandfather’s money for enough wood to build a house. But when the man learned that Russell’s grandfather intended to build a school for Black children with it, he refused to give him the lumber or refund his money. His grandfather then matter of factly said he was  getting the money, the lumber, or his shotgun to kill the man. He got the lumber and built the school.

“And that’s the kind of stuff where he said, ‘Bill, be sure you don’t take nothing from nobody,” Russell told Branch.

Russell, born in 1934, and the rest of the family moved to Oakland, California, when he was eight. He graduated high school and then college at the University of San Francisco, where he led his team to two national titles. Later, his daughter graduated from Harvard Law School.

“So it’s the evolution of my family from my grandfather to my kids,” he said, summing up his grandfather’s influence, “from no school to Harvard Law School.”

The interview is like that, three hours with one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century. It’s not always easy to listen to — the racism he encountered in Boston in the 1960s was scarcely different than the Louisiana in the 1930s — but the thing that comes shining through is the rock-solid voice of Bill Russell, American icon.

How much did he and his family value education — not so much sports?

“My most prized possession,” he famously said, “was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.”

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My Job: Rachel Wetzel

Conservator Rachel Wetzel with Robert Cornelius collection items. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Describe your work at the Library.

I work in the conservation lab in the Madison Building. I am responsible for assessing, treating, housing and monitoring photographic materials within the Library’s collections. I am a liaison to the Prints and Photographs and Music divisions and to the American Folklife Center. My day-to-day tasks can vary from suggesting the proper type of storage box to performing conservation treatments on photographs that are torn, degraded, broken or damaged. I also collaborate with conservation scientists in the Preservation Research and Testing Division on scientific research studies designed to identify best conservation practices.

How did you prepare for your position?

I received a master’s degree in art conservation from (SUNY) Buffalo State College and a certificate from the Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at the George Eastman Museum/Rochester Institute of Technology. I was hired at the Library in 2019 after being employed at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia for 12 years.

What have been your standout projects here at the Library?

I arrived eight months before the pandemic hit, so projects have looked very different for me from my early days on-site. In my first month, I was assigned three large collage photographs, each containing passport photographs of famous jazz musicians from the Bruce Lundvall collection in the Music Division. Each tiny photo was adhered with an undesirable adhesive to poor quality mat boards. I had to remove each photograph individually, reduce the adhesive on the verso and then remount them all to a new mat board in a safer, more stable manner.

We have a computerized mat cutter, and upon my first time using it I had to program it to cut out about 25 small openings for each photo with additional openings beneath each for the sitter’s name. It required a lot of precise measuring and patience to get it perfect. My colleagues seemed generally impressed with my ability to master this software and produce this mat. I was just relieved I didn’t have to cut 50 mat openings by hand.

What are your favorite collections items at the Library?

I am obsessed with 19th-century photography from Philadelphia, and the Library’s abundant collection of this was a huge factor in my decision to work here. One particular object that stands out is an album in P&P titled, “Views of Old Philadelphia, Collected by Joseph Y. Jeanes.” The album contains salted-paper prints and cyanotypes of the city, many taken by photographer Frederick de Bourg Richards in the mid-19th century. Each photograph was carefully compiled, and together the images capture the essence of the city in the most beautiful way.

De Bourg Richards was a daguerreotypist who started around 1849. He took a number of street views at a time when the rest of the city was focused on portraiture. More peculiarly, he photographed other earlier daguerreotype street views made by William G. Mason in the early 1840s and reprinted them in paper formats as part of this series. The concept of photographing the photograph this way is alluring, so this album is high on my list of research projects in the near future.

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Robert Cornelius and the First Selfie

The world’s first “selfie,” a self-portrait taken by Cornelius in 1839. Prints and Photographs Division.

A 30-year-old man stood alone in the yard of his family’s Philadelphia gas lighting business. The year was 1839, and it was late October or early November. In front of him was a makeshift camera, its lens fashioned from an opera glass.

He’d already determined the daylight was adequate to expose the carefully prepared metal plate within the camera and take a photograph of himself. Last but not least, he had to remain motionless and gaze forward for 10 to 15 minutes — no easy task.

The man was Robert Cornelius, and people sometimes joke that he took the world’s first selfie that day when he posed in his yard, broodingly handsome with his collar upturned and his hair disheveled. But he accomplished much more than the term “selfie” implies.

“Taking a portrait is astounding in 1839,” said Rachel Wetzel of the Library’s Conservation Division. “Taking a self-portrait is a whole next level up from that. That portrait is incredibly significant.”

Cornelius’ picture, a daguerreotype, is considered the earliest extant photographic portrait in the world. The Library acquired it in 1996, along with other examples of Cornelius’ works, as part of the Marian S. Carson collection.

A collection of Cornelius material recently acquired by the Library included this original camera lens. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Now, the Library’s Cornelius holdings, already the largest anywhere, have grown even bigger: In December, Cornelius’ great-great-grand-daughter, Sarah Bodine, donated an important collection of his photographic materials and ephemera.

The trove includes a Cornelius daguerreotype and portraits of his children by other early Philadelphia daguerreotypists, along with Cornelius’ experimental camera lenses and papers associated with his business dealings and patent applications.

“The collection gives a much broader picture of Robert Cornelius at the Library, beyond the photographs we currently hold,” said Micah Messenheimer of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

It is thanks largely to Wetzel’s expertise in all things Cornelius that the Bodine collection made its way to the Library.

Before joining the Library in 2019, Wetzel worked as a photo conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia (CCAHA). There, she and a team of conservators drawn from across institutions, including two from the Library, conducted research on early daguerreotypes and how best to preserve them.

A film storage box used by Cornelius. Photo: Shawn Miller.

To deepen knowledge of Cornelius’ work and techniques, Wetzel also began compiling a database (which now resides at the Library) to document his photographs and their condition. Even though Cornelius photographed subjects for only three years, he was enormously successful, and his photos now exist in far-flung locations.

Just months before Cornelius took his self-portrait in 1839, Louis J.M. Daguerre announced his invention of the daguerreotype process in France and published the formula. Cornelius’ collaborator, scientist Paul Beck Goddard, soon altered Daguerre’s formula for treating camera plates by combining bromine with iodine — Daguerre used just iodine.

The new treatment reduced exposure times — by a lot. So, instead of sitting in front of a camera for up to 25 minutes, a photographic subject had to remain still for only 30 seconds to two minutes.

“For portraiture, it was a big thing,” Wetzel said.

Most significantly, it made the daguerreotype process commercially viable. Cornelius set up Philadelphia’s first photo portrait studio to much acclaim. His portraits were so esteemed that Daguerre himself reportedly sent daguerreotypes from France in exchange for Cornelius’ work.

This daguerreotype shows the view from the window of Cornelius’ second- floor studio at 8th and Lodge. Prints and Photographs Division.

Publicity surrounding Wetzel’s quest to find and document Cornelius’ photography eventually brought her into contact with Bodine — and two other Cornelius descendants.

Robert Cornelius IV, who goes by Bob, was the first to get in touch. He brought his Cornelius daguerreotype to Wetzel at the CCAHA. Later, Bob brought his cousin from Connecticut, Albert Gee, another descendant, to show Wetzel his Cornelius materials.

Bodine found Wetzel, by then at the Library, through a Google search. Bodine had recently discovered Cornelius materials in her attic in New Jersey as she was downsizing to move. She had it in mind to donate the materials to a repository, but she wanted to know more about them first. So, she invited Wetzel to visit.

Wetzel brought Bob with her to New Jersey. He did not know Bodine, a cousin, beforehand. She descends from a different Cornelius child — Cornelius and his wife, Harriet, had eight children together.

Wetzel spent a day and a half with Bodine going over her materials. The collection includes one daguerreotype by Cornelius along with portraits of his family members and copious ephemera — deeds, calling cards, news clippings, a valentine to Harriet Cornelius from her husband, the eulogy he wrote for her in 1884 and locks of her hair and his.

Seven patent applications relate to improvements Cornelius invented for gas lighting, his family’s business, to which he returned after his brief but storied foray into photography.

A favorite item in Bodine’s collection is a box containing lenses wrapped in what looked like a cut-up nightshirt that still had a tag embroidered with a small “C” on it.

“Thinking about how the lens that might have been used to make that self-portrait could have been in that box was pretty thrilling for me,” Wetzel said.

Wetzel is continuing to study early daguerreotypes, analyzing how they age and ways to stabilize them. She’s now working with Messenheimer to create a database of every daguerreotype in P&P’s collection, documenting the condition of each with notes and photographs.

“While my work has focused on Cornelius,” Wetzel said, “all of the best practices that are being developed through the Cornelius project will be applied to ensuring the longevity of every daguerreotype at the Library.”

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Library of the Unexpected: Cocaine, Hair and…Wedding Cake?

The contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated. Photo: Shawn Miller. Prints and Photographs Division.

This article also appears in the current issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

When a Library collects more than 171 million objects over the course of a couple of centuries, odds are that some unusual items will filter into the mix. Along with traditional library fare such as books, maps, manuscripts, magazines, prints, photographs, movies and recordings, the Library has … other things.

Like a piece of the World Trade Center and a piece of cake from  Gen. Tom Thumb’s wedding (now nearly 160 years old). Here’s a secret Vietnam War POW list, written on toilet paper, and there’s a 1,000-year-old postclassic Mayan incense burner in the shape of a diving bat. We have an unidentified lock of hair from Clara Barton’s diary, and the whiteboard upon which astronomer Carl Sagan sketched out the plot to the movie “Contact.” Here’s a set of dessert plates hand-decorated by Rudyard Kipling, and there’s a map of the Grand Canyon made entirely of chocolate. Burl Ives’ custom-made guitar, anyone? Walking sticks of Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman? An Oscar for “High Noon” or Leonard Bernstein’s vanity license plate (“Maestro”) from his Ferrari?

All of those are real. But it is not true, no matter how delightful the rumor, that the Library has a very small stash of Sigmund Freud’s cocaine. We have a very small stash of Freud’s friend’s cocaine.

Also, we have a tuft of Canadian “muskox wool” from the collection of — did you doubt this? — Teddy Roosevelt.

“It is a capital misfortune,” Roosevelt wrote in 1918 to the explorer who sent it to him, “that the muskox has not been tamed.”

The Library preserves items from the 1918 influenza pandemic: A bottle of “Flu-Oil,” a jar of “Ec-to Balm” and two medals identifying medical workers. Photo: Shawn Miller.

These are all eyebrow-raising exceptions to the rule of what the Library collects. The Library is home to the national narrative, the papers of presidents, politicians, artists, inventors and everyday citizens. The Library’s mission is to serve Congress and preserve the nation’s story, along with a good bit of world knowledge. It’s not an artifact-filled museum and does not double as a collector of oddball ephemera.

But it would also be a capital misfortune if the nation’s library did not have a scattering of such delightfully offbeat and wholly original items. These items came in as part of larger collections and we kept them because the Library is also a history of us, of humankind, and that messy history can’t all be contained on paper, vinyl, film and tape. These are some of the items that help give the tactile sense of bygone people who were about our size and height, who lived with the same phobias and desires that we do today. They offer a bit of needed spice, of raw humanity.

Take Whitman’s walking stick. Put that and his haversack in hand and you can take the measure of the man himself. Along with a bronze cast of his hand (we have that, too), you get the sense of what a big-boned man he was, no matter the delicate nature of his poetic lyricism. If he shook your hand, you’d remember the grip.

The beginning of Norma Jenner’s letter to her husband, Joseph, a soldier in World War II.

Or consider lipstick kisses. Wives and girlfriends puckered up onto pieces of paper and sent them to their boyfriends and husbands in World War II (if not before), as the Veterans History Project documents. The colors are still vibrant.

“Darling, I really did kiss the paper and it was quite without a kick,” wrote Norma Jenner to her husband, Joseph, an Army corporal serving in Europe, on June 10, 1944, on a bright pink sheet of stationery designed for such smackers. “I’d much rather it were your lips.”

Aviators in World War II also signed currency for one another, sometimes stringing bills together into long strips. They were nicknamed “short snorters” after shots of whiskey, and the Library has a few. The toilet paper, a list of American POWS kept among themselves, including a young John McCain, is from the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” in Vietnam. Combined, these pieces give a visceral sense of the passions of war.

The contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated give us insight into the everyday aspect of the man’s life. They are touching and, in their way, almost impossibly sad. His brown leather wallet, containing a Confederate $5 bill and eight newspaper clippings. An embroidered linen handkerchief. A watch fob. Spectacles, mended with a piece of string. A pocketknife.

These are not the belongings of an immortal icon, striding through history. They are the belongings of a self-educated man born on the frontier of a rough nation, Robert’s father, Mary’s husband; perhaps a slightly distracted man who went out for an evening of comic relief at a theater and never came home. The items he carried show his life arrested in stop motion. They were not displayed at the Library until 1976, when then-Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin thought they would give a human touch to a president who was “mythologically engulfed.”

The Library captures lives around the world, too.

In Vienna in the early 1880s, at the city’s General Hospital, we meet a neuropathology lecturer named Sigmund Freud. He’s not yet famous, but he’s got big dreams.

This cocaine belonged to physician Carl Koller, who experimented with the drug as an anesthetic used during eye surgery. Photo: Shawn Miller. Manuscript Division. 

Meg McAleer, the historian who oversees the Freud collection, explains that Freud and fellow doctors were experimenting with the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine. Such a sense of calm! No anxiety in social situations! And what a feeling of strength! Freud even sent a vial to his fiancé. He published on the potential therapeutic uses of cocaine (depression, pain management, exhaustion, morphine addiction) in June 1884.

But then Carl Koller, a physician in his circle, began to experiment with cocaine at Freud’s urging. Koller subsequently made a breakthrough of using it as an anesthetic during eye surgery that same year. It made him world famous, much to Freud’s chagrin. Freud wrote to his fiancé on Oct. 29, 1884: “The cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion’s share to others.”

Koller, meanwhile, put a tiny bit of the excess cocaine he’d used in that groundbreaking surgery in an envelope and tucked in his files. More than a century later, when his daughter donated a collection of his papers to the Library, staff members came across the envelope during processing. The FBI verified that the “fine, white, slightly yellow powder” was inert. It was returned to a vault.

People in South America, the native ground of the coca plant, had been chewing its leaves for thousands of years before Freud came along, and the Library also has rare coca bags from Mexico that are more than 2,000 years old. Alongside those is a green stone bead, also more than 2,000 years old, that still has a piece of necklace cord or twine running through it. This would have been suspended around the neck of a Maya, Nahua or Olmec noble.

This 2,000-year-old bead, once part of a necklace, still has a bit of twine running through it. Geography and Map Division. 

“It’s not just a piece of stone but also an example of a complex interaction between an ancient craftsperson and their environment,” says John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas. “Here we find not only a piece of material culture but also the preservation of a moment in time, of a person just being in the world.”

As Hessler points out, in items like these there’s the indescribable magic, the gasp-inducing sense of touch. When we hold the things of those who went before us, it shows us that his hand went here. Her pen moved along the page just there.

It is as close to touching ghosts as we can come.

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A New Vision for an Inspiring Location

Artist’s rendering of the future oculus – a circular glass window that will allow visitors to look up to the dome of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building from a new orientation center.

The first time I stepped onto the floor of the Library of Congress’ Main Reading Room and looked up at the soaring, picturesque dome, I was overcome with a sense of wonder and gratitude for the opportunity to experience the inspiration that this iconic American space provides.

Because the Main Reading Room continues to serve as a working space for researchers, I had an opportunity to experience this majestic dome that many of the 2 million yearly visitors to the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building cannot have … yet.

One of the many features in the Library’s comprehensive Visitor Experience Master Plan will offer every visitor is the opportunity to gaze up at that dome — a painting that represents Human Understanding in the act of lifting the veil of ignorance and looking forward to intellectual progress.

A rendering of the new orientation center. The oculus, in the center of the room, will allow visitors to see the ceiling of the Main Reading Room.

The Library will accomplish this, while also preserving the quiet character and intended function of the Main Reading Room, by installing an oculus – a circular glass window that will allow all visitors to see the dome from a new orientation center below the Main Reading Room. It’s where visitors will begin their Library journey.

For the researcher seeking insight, information and inspiration in the Main Reading Room, the experience will change very little. Librarians will be available to assist researchers. Staff will still deliver and distribute books and other research materials for use there. Access to digital resources will continue. The circular desk at the center of the room will remain. Only the cabinet enclosing a central staircase and book elevator at the center of the room, which has been modified and updated several times since 1897, will be removed to make way for the oculus. In most areas of the Main Reading Room, the oculus will be invisible, since it will be inside the perimeter of the circular desk.

Meanwhile, the new orientation center will occupy the space previously used as the control room. The historic functions of the control room, where books arrived for delivery to the Main Reading Room via the book elevator (which replaced the original dumbwaiter), have evolved many times since 1897 when the Library opened.

Today, the delivery of materials no longer requires a central control room. Repurposing that space will provide visitors with an educational and inspiring orientation to the Library’s vast resources, as well as a stunning view of the Main Reading Room’s dome.

A new learning center is part of the renovation project.

These are just a few of the exciting elements of the Library’s Visitor Experience Master Plan, which also includes a new Treasures Gallery and a learning center that will offer families, teens and school groups with opportunities to engage with Library collections through innovative interactive experiences.

All of these new experiences are possible thanks to generous investments from Congress and from generous private sector donations. David Rubenstein, the chairman of the Library’s James Madison Council and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, has pledged $10 million to support the visitor experience project, and other private sector donors will also support it. Congress has expressed enthusiastic support and has appropriated $40 million to fund it.

The planning, design and construction of a project of this scope is significant. If current efforts remain on track, we look forward to welcoming our first visitors to experience some of the new elements included in the Visitor Engagement Master Plan in 2023 when the Treasures Gallery opens.

The Library seeks to democratize access. We want to share the art and architecture of one of Washington’s most grand and beautiful rooms with the many, not the few. This is a public treasure funded by the American people — and more people should experience the wonder of their national library.

The Library’s mission is to engage, inspire and inform Congress and the American people – researchers and visitors alike – with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity. The Visitor Experience Master Plan represents a visionary pathway to engage more Americans than ever in their Library, the Library of Congress.

A new gallery of the Library’s treasures will allow more visitors to see more of the Library’s most important holdings.

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The 2022 National Book Festival Lineup Reveal!

Featured authors, from left to right: Nick Offerman, Janelle Monáe, Sabaa Tahir, Leslie Jordan, Geraldine Brooks, Nyle DiMarco, Angie Thomas.

The 2022 Library of Congress National Book Festival returns to returns to live audiences this Labor Day weekend for the first time in three years, bringing celebrities and cult favorites back to Washington for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live events across the nation’s capital.

The one-day, all-day festival — Saturday, Sept. 3, from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. — will feature more than 120 authors, poets and writers under the theme of “Books Bring Us Together.” It’s not quite the same festival as fans have known in past years, as there will be new storytelling and audiobook events. Festival stages have been renamed and refocused, including the addition of a Life/Style stage to encompass changing pop culture trends.

Big names abound. Singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe discusses bringing the Afrofuturistic world of her albums to the written page for her book, “The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer.” Deaf activist Nyle DiMarco shares his story in “Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life.”Actor Nick Offerman, perhaps best known for his role as Ron Swanson on  NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” talks about his love of the great outdoors in “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.” Comedian and internet personality Leslie Jordan is sure to entertain with a discussion of his book, “How Y’all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived.”

Young audiences will be enthralled by a conversation featuring the six authors behind “Blackout” —Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk and Nicola Yoon. Author Donna Barba Higuera joins the Young Adult stage to discuss her award-winning dystopian novel “The Last Cuentista.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks shares her latest novel “Horse.” Clint Smith discusses his recent work “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.”

The festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Doors will open at 8:30 a.m. The festival is free and open to everyone.

Can’t make it? No problem. Events on several of the stages will be livestreamed. Videos of all presentations will be made available on demand shortly after the festival.

The full lineup of featured authors follows, organized by stage.

Main Stage: Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk and Nicola Yoon; Nyle DiMarco; Leslie Jordan; Janelle Monáe; Nick Offerman.

History & Biography: Tomiko Brown-Nagin; Jack E. Davis; Howard W. French; Kate Clifford Larson; Kelly Lytle Hernández; David Maraniss; Candice Millard; Clint Smith; Danyel Smith.

Life/Style: Geoffrey L. Cohen; Tracy Dennis-Tiwary; Todd Doughty; Hekima Hapa and Lesley Ware; Celeste Headlee; David M. Rubenstein; Ellen Vora.

Pop Lit: Mitch Albom; Louis Bayard; Jennifer Close; Susan Coll; Karen Joy Fowler; Grant Ginder; Xochitl Gonzalez; Katie Gutierrez; Dolen Perkins-Valdez; Amanda Eyre Ward.

Science Fiction & Fantasy: Chelsea Abdullah; Holly Black; B. L. Blanchard; Rob Hart; M. J. Kuhn; Victor Manibo; Tochi Onyebuchi; Leslye Penelope; Lucinda Roy; Nghi Vo.

Society & Culture: Rachel Aviv; Gal Beckerman; Daniel Bergner; Juli Berwald; Will Bunch; Morten Høi Jensen, Shawn McCreesh and Becca Rothfeld; Kathryn Judge; Brendan McConville; Robert Samuels; Linda Villarosa; Edith Widder; Elizabeth Williamson; Ed Yong.

Writers Studio: Nuar Alsadir; Geraldine Brooks; Kim Fu; Diana Goetsch; Rebecca Miller; Tomás Q. Morín; Sarah Ruhl; Morgan Talty; Jesmyn Ward; Lidia Yuknavitch.

KidLit: Kwame Alexander; Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris; Fred Bowen and James E. Ransome; David Bowles; Soman Chainani; Johnnie Christmas; Erin Entrada Kelly; Kat Fajardo; Lev Grossman; Gordon Korman; Juliet Menéndez; Andrea Davis Pinkney and Tybre Faw; Julian Randall; Tui T. Sutherland; Jennifer Ziegler.

Please Read Me A Story: Derrick Barnes and Vanessa Brantley-Newton; Mac Barnett; Ruth Behar; Ruby Bridges; Marc Brown; Xelena González; Bakari Sellers; Brittany J. Thurman.

Young Adult: Samira Ahmed; Victoria Aveyard; Donna Barba Higuera; Namina Forna; Chloe Gong; Tiffany D. Jackson; Ryan La Sala; Ebony LaDelle; Darcie Little Badger; Malinda Lo; E. Lockhart; Anna-Marie McLemore; Jason Reynolds; R. M. Romero; Sabaa Tahir; David Valdes.

All authors will participate in book signings following their events. Festivalgoers will be able to purchase books by the featured authors from Politics & Prose, the official bookseller of the 2022 National Book Festival.

In collaboration with the Library’s National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, the festival will feature a panel of popular audiobook narrators sharing insights into their work. The festival will also feature for the first time performances by the literary nonprofit Literature to Life, a performance-based literacy program that presents professionally staged verbatim adaptations of American literary classics.

Ada Limón, the Nation’s New Poet Laureate

Ada Limón at the U.S. Capitol. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced the appointment of Ada Limón as the nation’s 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2022-2023. Limón will take up her duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary season on Sept. 29 with a reading of her work in the Coolidge Auditorium.

“Ada Limón is a poet who connects,” Hayden said. “Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.”

Limón joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Joy Harjo who served three terms in the position (2019-2022), Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove.

“What an incredible honor,” Limón said. “Again and again, I have been witness to poetry’s immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion.”

Limón was born in Sonoma, California, in 1976 and is of Mexican ancestry.

She is the author of six poetry collections, including “The Carrying” (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; “Bright Dead Things” (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; “Sharks in the Rivers” (2010); “Lucky Wreck” (Autumn House, 2006); and “This Big Fake World” (Pearl Editions, 2006). She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Her newest poetry collection, “The Hurting Kind,” was recently published as part of a three-book deal with Milkweed Editions that includes the publication of “Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems,” featuring work by major poets over the last century, followed by a volume of new and selected poems.

Limón is currently the host of  “The Slowdown,” the  American Public Media podcast series which was launched as part of Tracy K. Smith’s poet laureateship in 2019. Limón serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Library’s Poetry and Literature Center is the home of the Poet Laureate, a position that has existed since 1937, when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library. Since then, many of the nation’s most eminent poets have served in the position. A 1985 congressional law states it is  “equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.”

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The Neil Simon Collection: Now Playing at the Library of Congress

Neil Simon on the cover of Time Magazine  in 1986. Music Division. Photo: Shawn Milller.

Flipping through one of Neil Simon’s scrapbooks in the Library’s recently arrived collection of his work, one comes across an article about his first Broadway play, “Come Blow Your Horn.”

The 1961 play was a huge success, running for more than 600 performances. But one New York newspaper, echoing Simon’s own worries, wondered if he might be a one-hit wonder. Simon was a working professional in his mid-30s, after all, busy with a day job of writing quips for comedians and hosts on radio and television. It had taken him more than three years and a dozen top-to-bottom rewrites to put together “Horn.” Plus, he said, playwriting was “totally different” from his usual work.

“Now I’m supposed to come up with another hit to prove my first smash wasn’t some sort of fluke,” Simon told Newsday, the Long Island daily.

The resulting headline: “His 1st Play Drew Raves, Problem Is How to Repeat.”

If this was a Simon play, this is the part where the lead character, after reading that aloud, would turn to the audience, deadpan, and with merely a knowing look, let the laughs rain down.

Simon, of course, went on to become the most commercially successful playwright in American history and one of the most honored. “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “Biloxi Blues,” “Plaza Suite,” “Lost in Yonkers.” By the time he died at age 91 in 2018, he his career included 28 Broadway plays, five musicals, 11 original screenplays and 14 film adaptations of his own work.

One of Simon’s artworks. Music Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Focusing on comedy and usually autobiographically inspired, he rarely took on the heavy socials issues of the era, yet he and his work won the Pulitzer Prize, four Writers Guild of America Awards, four Tony Awards, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a Kennedy Center Honor and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, among others. His screenwriting earned four Academy Award nominations.

His collection was donated to the Library earlier this year, an acquisition marked with a ceremony featuring his widow, Elaine Joyce, and actor Matthew Broderick, who starred in many of his works. Mark Horowitz, a senior specialist in the Music Division, says Simon’s vast collection is “everything we hoped for and more.”

“It preserves and documents the history, work and creative process of one of our most significant American writers,” Horowitz says.

It’s a dazzling addition to the Library’s collection of theater work, including at least some script material for more than 180 plays, films and musicals. In addition to numerous drafts of all of his famous works, there are many completed works that went unproduced and are unknown to the public. Other titles are fragments, with only a scene or two.

There is also a vast trove of letters, photographs, programs, newspaper clippings, and most unexpectedly, several notebooks filled with his drawings, cartoons and artwork. There’s even a pair of his glasses and a collection of signed baseballs. (The latter includes Hall of Famers such as Tommy Lasorda, Eddie Murray and Tony Gwynn.)

Simon’s notebook draft of “The Odd Couple” for a 2005 revival starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Music Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

His first drafts are neatly written out in longhand — in cursive you can read! — in dime-store notebooks. Most typescript drafts are dated, numbered and often signed, such as “7th draft, 9/99.”

Writing in pen, in notebooks he often mimicked a play’s typeset layout— neatly rendering the play’s title, his name and the date in the style of a title page. He did the same in his handwritten script pages, centering the dialogue and set directions with the character’s name above their lines.

Sometimes, even after typing up a second or third draft, he would go back to handwriting for later drafts. This is a fascinating thing to note — despite his mammoth success, he was still copying and rewriting line after line in pen. He changed or deleted words, sentences and sections. He marked those changes by hand in the margins, or in additional notebooks, or sometimes he inserted different colored pages to mark new passages. Those scenes were listed in the front of the manuscript. When, deep in these notebooks, he wanted to indicate a change to be typed up later, he would write in act and scene numbers along with pagination of where the inserts were to go.

One of Simon’s draft pages Photo: Shawn Miller. 

Despite Simon’s record-breaking success, it didn’t mean that everything he did made it to the market.

One unproduced screenplay in the late 1980s had at least three different titles. It started off as “Just Looking,” was then titled “Jake and Kate” and, finally between 1987 and 1989, was called “A Couple of Swells.” One early draft is written in longhand in a green notebook. Later drafts are typed, signed and dated, along with notes indicating the earlier titles.

Still, the show remained unproduced.

By 1989, he was back to writing in longhand on a third draft, this time in a notebook with a bright yellow cover. He worked on it meticulously, changing small things from the first page to the last.

And still, even at the peak of his career, it never made it to the screen. (He did use “A Couple of Swells” as a chapter title in his memoir, fittingly titled “Rewrites,” in 1996.)

You want the mark of greatness? It’s that sort of far-from-the-glamour dedication, right down to making word edits on a script that, even after three years of off-and-on work, showed no signs of being brought to life. Even then, he kept up with each draft, each set of changes, neatly labeling and signing the work.

The most successful playwright in American history didn’t get that way by chance – he just kept sweating the details, getting the laughs just right.

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Average Jones: Solving Crimes via the Classifieds

“Average Jones” by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Cover art: George Reiter Brill, adapted from an 1896 magazine cover.

This is a guest post by Zach Klitzman, the editorial assistant in the Library’s Publishing Office .

Does a B-flat trombone player have anything to do with an assassination attempt? Why does a man only speak in Latin? Can the word “mercy” have a sinister meaning? And who stole a necklace of “blue fire” from a hotel room?

These puzzles and more are central to the latest Library of Congress Crime Classic, “Average Jones” by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a popular and prolific journalist and novelist in the early 20th century whose works were often turned into popular films.

First published in 1911, “Average Jones” is a collection of 10 short stories featuring Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, known to his friends as “Average.” Jones is anything but average, though, as his brilliant mind allows him to become a successful “Ad-Visor,” an investigator of classified ads on behalf of clients to root out swindlers.

The stories have newspaper advertising at their heart, but they also have all the elements that mystery readers enjoy. Identifying possible crimes in ads, while placing his own ads to stop them, Jones uncovers plots to steal inheritances, defraud the public into viewing fake exhibits, and assassinate both a New York City mayoral candidate and New York state’s governor. While many stories take place in and around the Big Apple, adventures also include a foray into Mexico to rescue a possibly kidnapped wayward son; a sojourn to Baltimore to meet the Latin-speaking man; and an investigation into puzzling letters mailed from Connecticut. The final story serves as a romantic coda, when Jones falls in love with a potential victim of a crime.

Adams was born and educated in western New York, became an expert on the state’s history, and these stories no doubt drew on his career as a muckraking journalist, especially his investigations into dishonest advertising and patent medicine. Collier’s magazine published his 11-part exposé, “The Great American Fraud,” in 1905, and its successful denunciation of the patent medicine industry played a role in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Samuel Hopkins Adams, front left, carrying a pen nib, along with other muckraking journalists in “The Crusaders.” Illustration: Carl Hassman. Prints & Photographs Division.

He was very well known for this work; in an illustration for Puck magazine in 1906, Carl Hassman depicted Adams front and center-left wielding a pen nib as a sword. His fellow muckrakers also appear, including Ida Tarbell, lifting a banner for McClure’s Magazine on horseback, and Lincoln Steffens, also on horseback, on the right.

Adams went on to write more than 50 books, including mysteries, presidential biographies, nonfiction and works for children. During the 1920s, writing under the pseudonym of Warner Fabian, he published half a dozen novels featuring Jazz Age characters and risqué plots. Several of these and other works were adapted into successful films.

A poster for “It Happened One Night,” based on an Adams’ short story.

“The Wild Party” starred Clara Bow and “Sailors’ Wives” starred Mary Astor, both huge names in the 1920s. His short story “Night Bus” was adapted in 1934 to “It Happened One Night,” now regarded as one of Hollywood’s classic films. Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, directed by Frank Capra, it’s one of only three films to win all five major Academy Awards. It was inducted into the Library’s National Film Registry in 1993.

Other stories adapted into films included “The Gorgeous Hussy” (starring Joan Crawford) in 1936 and “The Harvey Girls” (starring Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury) in 1945. His final novel, “The Tenderloin,” was made into a Broadway musical in 1961, three years after Adams died at the age of 87.

Poster from 1961 for “Tenderloin,” a musical based on Adams’ novel. Prints & Photographs Division.

While the Average Jones stories were just a small part of Adams’ output, they displayed their creator’s socially conscious attitudes and dedication to muckraking, along with intriguing mysteries and a sharp sense of humor.

Launched in 2020, the Crime Classics series features some of the finest American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s. Drawn from the Library’s collections, each volume includes the original text, an introduction, author biography, notes, recommendations for further reading and suggested discussion questions from mystery expert Leslie S. Klinger. This special edition also features illustrations from the original edition of the book, drawn by M. Leone Bracker.

Crime Classics are published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the Library of Congress. “Average Jones,” published on June 7, is available in softcover ($14.99) from booksellers worldwide, including the Library of Congress shop