Library of America presents LOA LIVE

April 22, 2021—Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward O. Wilson has transformed our sense of the natural world and humanity’s place in it. In a time of climate crisis and shrinking biodiversity, his lyrical, thought-provoking, and increasingly prophetic work inspires wonder and reverence for our fragile natural world. Renowned nature and science writer David Quammen, editor of the new LOA collectio...

April 15, 2021—Richard Wright’s daughter Julia Wright and grandson Malcolm Wright join bestselling author Kiese Laymon for a special program to mark Library of America’s release of a previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by a great American writer at the height of his powers. Richard Wright wrote The Man Who Lived Underground in the 1940s just after Native Son. He considered...

March 30, 2021—The Western, with its tales of adventure, honor, and violence set against the magnificent landscapes of the frontier, has had an enduring hold on the American imagination. In this freewheeling conversation inspired by LOA series volumes The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s and Elmore Leonard: Westerns, four film critics with a literary bent—Terrence Rafferty, Gene Sey...

March 18, 2021—Feminist writer-activists of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s sparked a diverse, visionary, and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that fifty years later is as relevant and urgent as it’s ever been. Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore, editors of Library of America’s revelatory new Women’s Liberation! anthology, lead an inter-generational conversation about the living que...

March 3, 2021 — Published to a mixed reception in 1974, James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk has undergone a marked critical reappraisal in recent years, aided in part by its inclusion in the 2015 Library of America volume James Baldwin: Later Novels and by the Barry Jenkins film adaptation in 2018. In the latest installment of the LOA Live series “Reading James Baldwin Now,” Literary...

February 18, 2021 — One hundred years ago Langston Hughes published his now-famous first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In the decades that followed, as both a longtime resident of Harlem and a cosmopolitan world traveler, Hughes wrote of Black life in masterful, deceptively simple poems and prose that made him one of the most popular and influential writers of the twentieth century. Brent Ha...

January 27, 2021 — The past year has been a historic stress test for American democracy. Where do we stand now? What can our tradition of political writings tell us about what lies ahead? New Yorker writer and Columbia University Professor of Journalism Nicholas Lemann, editor of Library of America’s new anthology American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions, leads a conversation...

December 16, 2020—In 1950 Charles M. Schulz debuted a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture—hilarious, poignant, inimitable. The Peanuts characters continue to resonate with millions of fans, their beguiling four-panel adventures and television escapades offering lessons about happiness, friendship, disappointment, childhood, and life itself. Andrew Blaune...

December 2, 2020 — Ernest Hemingway, one of the towering presences in American literature, is published this season in the Library of America and explored in a forthcoming PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick airing in Spring 2021. Novick joins co-producer Sarah Botstein and Robert W. Trogdon, editor of LOA’s Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926, for a sneak prev...

October 29, 2020 — Known to millions for her classic story “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson took the American gothic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft and brought it down to earth in novels and stories that brilliantly plumbed the dark underside of the conformist postwar decades. Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, editor of Library of America’s Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s and 5...

October 13, 2020 — In his Pulitzer Prize–winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Richard Hofstadter explored the persistent strains of irrationality and conspiratorial thinking in American culture and their threat to our democratic politics. How can Hofstadter help us make sense of 2020, a year when fringe conspiracy theories move...

September 23, 2020 — In 1965, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s essay “The White Man’s Guilt" unmasked the myths and lies that sustain racial injustice in America. We’re at a parallel moment now, writes Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. in his new book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own. In this LOA Live webinar Glaude, Distinguished Unive...

September 10, 2020 — On February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln boarded a train in Springfield, Illinois, bound for Washington and his inauguration as leader of a tragically divided nation. Join historian Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington and editor of Library of America’s two-volume edition of American Speeches, as he explores the President-Elect’s dangerous and t...

August 26, 2020 — New productions are reassessing and updating great Golden Age Broadway musicals like Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and My Fair Lady to reflect contemporary aspirations for American society. Are these new interpretations departing from or reviving their original spirit and meaning? Join Laurence Maslon, NYU arts professor and editor of Library of America’s American Musicals; Tazewell...

August 6, 2020 — To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton and Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, discuss the writer and friend who put his remarkable literary gifts in the service of disarmament, nonviolence, international cooperation, and the...

July 28, 2020 — As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton streams on Disney+, Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and editor of the Library of America edition of Hamilton’s writing (which helped to inspire Miranda), discusses the musical and what it tells us about how history is made and remade. Presented in partnership with the National Council for History Educa...

July 16, 2020 — Novelist and cultural critic Darryl Pinckney offers a close reading of Baldwin’s beautiful, blistering memoir of the events that forged his consciousness of race and identity: growing up in Harlem, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, his long residence in France, his fateful decision to return to the American South. Presented in partnership with the Schomburg Cen...

June 25, 2020 — The prophetic power of James Baldwin’s explorations of race and America’s unfulfilled promise has never been more illuminating or more necessary. Farah Jasmine Griffin, chair of Columbia University’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, offers a close reading of Baldwin’s unforgettable story of a jazz pianist’s struggles with his art and his addiction.

June 16, 2020 — Literary scholar David Mikics, editor of the Library of America volume Harold Bloom: The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, joins LOA’s John Kulka for an intimate conversation about how he wove several decades of Harold Bloom’s writing—much of it hard to find and long unavailable—into a compelling portrait of American literary genius. LOA President and Publish...

June 4, 2020 — Andrew J. Bacevich, editor of Library of America’s American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, and historian Sean Wilentz engage in an urgent and timely conversation about the past, present, and future of an often misunderstood tradition of American political thought.