Starting this June, Library of America presents an eight-part series of online classes featuring leading contemporary authors on the LOA writers that resonate deeply with them and have something vital to tell us at this moment.

You can purchase access to the entire series and save on the per-session cost, or pick and choose individual sessions to attend. See below for more information on registration.

REGISTRATON INFO

• Nov. 17: Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston
• Beginning with her stunning 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has forged a profound, richly imagined, and genre-defying narrative of the American experience from her vantage as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. In this session, we explore Kingston’s most influential books, The Woman Warrior and China Men, as she intended—back-to-back, as one longer epic about Chinese Americans. These hybrid books move between fiction and nonfiction, imagination and history, realism and fantasy, as they weave Chinese immigrants and their descendants into the fabric of the United States, where they have belonged since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Eight Sessions (scroll down for full descriptions)

• June 1: Annette Gordon-Reed on the Declaration of Independence and Lemuel Haynes’s “Liberty Further Extended”
• July 9: Joanne B. Freeman on Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville
• July 28: Nell Painter on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sojourner Truth
• Aug. 18: Joshua Cohen on Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Sept. 24: Parul Sehgal on Arthur Miller
• Oct. 29: Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop
• Nov. 17: Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston
• Dec. 3: Namwali Serpell on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison

Sessions will take place on Zoom and last 75 minutes. Attendees are encouraged to share questions in advance and during the class. Each session will be recorded and shared with registrants to watch anytime. Space is limited and registration will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

PRICING

Series pass: $350 (includes access to all sessions and 25% off all titles on the LOA Web Store)

LOA Members get the special members’ rate of $300 ($50 off). Learn more about the perks of becoming an LOA Member.

Individual session: $50 ($40 for LOA Members)

SCHOLARSHIPS

LOA is committed to making our programming accessible to as many people as possible.

If the cost to attend this series presents a hardship, or you are a teacher interested in attending for professional development, we are pleased to offer a number of scholarship places at a reduced rate. For more information and to request a tuition waiver, please e-mail support@loa.org.

If you would like to support Library of America’s online programming and help sponsor a reduced-rate scholarship for a deserving student or teacher, please consider making a $50 donation at checkout on Eventbrite or reach out to support@loa.org.

SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

All sessions meet at 2 pm ET.

Annette Gordon-Reed on the Declaration of Independence and Lemuel Haynes’s “Liberty Further Extended”
Monday, June 1
“The American story, from the very beginning, has been multifaceted, multicultured, and multiracial,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed. “People of color, even in the most dire situations, have always found ways to make their thoughts and feelings known.” Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) was a Revolutionary War veteran, the first ordained Black minister in the United States, and the first African American to receive an advanced degree. In the opening session of Reading America, we will discuss the Declaration of Independence and Haynes’s response to it, a 1776 essay entitled “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping.”

Joanne B. Freeman on Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville
Thursday, July 9
Throughout our nation’s history, its citizens, residents, and foreign observers have wrestled with the meaning of American democracy. In this session, we look at two writers with much to say on the topic: Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville. Hamilton had lifelong doubts about democracy, even as he worked to create and uphold America’s new democratic republic. Tocqueville, a French visitor to the United States in 1831–32, was a witness par excellence, describing and judging American democracy as only an outsider could. Putting these men in conversation reveals democracy in all its complexity, and exposes the beating heart of America.

Nell Painter on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sojourner Truth
Tuesday, July 28
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), giant of American letters, and Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883), feminist abolitionist stalwart, were near contemporaries, living ninety-five miles apart in Massachusetts in the 1840s. Emerson’s classic books, Essays and Self-Reliance, were published in the 1840s, while Truth’s self-published Narrative of Sojourner Truth appeared in 1850. Both promoted and sold their books in person on the lecture circuit, but they never met. In this session, we stage a meeting of Emerson and Truth’s minds through a closer look at their lives and works.

Joshua Cohen on Isaac Bashevis Singer
Tuesday, August 18
What makes a writer an American writer? Is it the accident of his birth, or perhaps the circumstances of his exile? His language? His themes? His audience? The works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the seventh American citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, raise these questions in fascinating ways. This session discusses three short classics by America’s great Yiddish writer: “Gimpel the Fool,” “The Destruction of Kreshev,” and “The Cafeteria.” Together, they bring the reader from Galician Poland to Manhattan’s East Side, and illuminate starkly different jewels—sweet, bitter, humorous, sexual—in the crown of this impish giant.

Parul Sehgal on Arthur Miller
Thursday, September 24
Arthur Miller’s plays of the 1940s and 1950s—All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge—electrified theatergoers and established him as one of the indispensable voices of the postwar era in America. With a particular focus on All My Sons, this session explores some of the characteristic conflicts of Miller’s work—between fathers and sons, desire and obligation, self and community—while paying close attention to the effect his mastery of dramatic devices such as motive, psychology, and resolution has on readers and audience members.

Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop
Thursday, October 28
The poems of Elizabeth Bishop are “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime,” wrote James Merrill. She is “our greatest national treasure.” Bishop’s work is notable for its use of narrative, its precision and reliance on exact detail, its reticence and power. This session will explore, via poems and letters, her ideas of loss and exile, plus the tone she takes: melancholy, precise, hushed, attentive, and careful to say nothing more than what each occasion demands.

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston
Tuesday, November 17
Beginning with her stunning 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has forged a profound, richly imagined, and genre-defying narrative of the American experience from her vantage as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. In this session, we explore Kingston’s most influential books, The Woman Warrior and China Men, as she intended—back-to-back, as one longer epic about Chinese Americans. These hybrid books move between fiction and nonfiction, imagination and history, realism and fantasy, as they weave Chinese immigrants and their descendants into the fabric of the United States, where they have belonged since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Namwali Serpell on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison
Thursday, December 3
While delivering the keynote address at a 1985 Faulkner conference in Oxford, Mississippi, Toni Morrison remarked that “in a very personal way, as a reader, he had an enormous effect” on her. Morrison’s engagement with Faulkner was a lifelong project, from her examination of The Sound and the Fury in her master’s thesis to ongoing reflections on his work in university lectures. This session delves into novels by Faulkner and Morrison—Absalom, Absalom! and A Mercy, respectively—to explore their treatment of Native Americans, their interest in co-created stories and invented language, Sutpen’s Hundred in relation to Jacob Vaark’s unfinished house, and the overlapping themes of possessive love and stopped time.

Course curator: Bernard Schwartz

Library of America, a nonprofit organization, champions our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.