Blog Posts by Subject: English and American Literature

We asked thirty staff members to select and read their favorite Shakespeare speech, monologue, or sonnet. We will release one each day throughout the month of April.

Colum McCann visited the library as part of our staff-wide read, so I caught up with him to see if he had other reading recommendations.

Wise, funny, sad, and hopeful, here are some of our favorite Flannery O'Connor quotes.

Who am I to begrudge a person wanting to take it easy in the golden years of his or her life? You should do whatever it is that will make you happy, even if it means that your fans will no longer have a new Philip Roth novel to read every year.

Darryl Pinckney is a Whiting Award winner, a former Cullman Fellow, and a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. He visited the New York Public Library for a Conversation at the Cullman Center co-sponsored by the NYRB to discuss his book Black Deutschland with Zadie Smith.

On March 1, 1914 Ralph Ellison was born. Today, we celebrate the author by reading his masterpiece Invisible Man. Here is why you should too.

Personal reflections on Harper Lee's first novel.

Stephen King asked Twitter to come up with great novels about Ohio, and we rose to the challenge.

An unassuming black notebook contains the earliest draft of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, written by hand and with the author’s frequent emendations.

Today’s letter features correspondence between Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and Langston Hughes. In the excerpt below, Schomburg speaks with Hughes regarding acquisitions for The Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints—the forerunner to today’s Schomburg Center.

To read James Joyce is to encounter a radical idiom in service of indiscriminate observation.

Books that made one librarian fall in love with reading all over again this year.

To commemorate Emma and one of our favorite book-to-film retellings, we're matching moments from Clueless to their counterparts in Jane Austen's novel, translating from valley girl to nineteenth century English. Why? Because, as Cher would say, "Duh, it's like a famous quote!"

Neil Gaiman reads from the only surviving "prompt" copy of the book, that is, Dickens's own annotated version used for live readings.

The students meet to see how much they understood in the pages they read at home, and they meet because they love to share their ideas with each other.

Find out what the Rocko's Modern Life and Reno 911 star likes to read.

Saturday, November 14 marks the anniversary of the publication of Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. In honor of this occasion, I made a "cool, collected dive" into the Library's collections, to share early editions, illustrated works, whale charts, and even scrimshaw—works that speak to the universe within this leviathan of a novel.

While in Hollywood consulting on a potential film adaptation of Brideshead that never materialized, Waugh observed American West Coast culture up close. His reaction was... not flattering.

Have a little fun with the Marches by taking our quiz, which asks you to identify which March sister said the certain quotes.