Books That Shaped America

The Library of Congress in Washington, D. C.  opened an exhibition last week celebrating “Books That Shaped America.” The exhibition is on 88 books that they’ve deemed to have the most influence on American culture .

The selection was hotly debated over by curators and experts at the Library, the list is wide-ranging in terms of genre; it includes children’s books like The Wizard of Oz, political treatises such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, works that shaped American language like Noah Webster’s A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, and works of drama and poetry, including Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Tennessee WilliamsA Streetcar Named Desire and novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.

One of the most controversial picks on the list is Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.

The full list of books is available on the LOC website, but if you want to see them in person, the exhibition will only be open from June 25 through September 29 in the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, DC.

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