Mark Twain's life (1835–1910) spanned an era that witnessed the transformation of America and the world by the Industrial Revolution. With the expansion of transportation, manufacturing, and communications technology, the focus of American life in the North began to shift from its farms and small towns to its cities. For Twain, such technological, industrial, and urban developments were the means by which America might become a more prosperous and just society and also realize the nineteenth-century ideal of universal progress. But his conflicted love affair with his native South and its rural culture and traditions, his close observation of the natural world, and hisRead More ›

Go onstage with Charles Dickens as he performs his Christmas Carol.

Charles Dickens could not only write a crackling good story, he could perform it. And so in 1853, he took his Christmas Carol show on the road, first in Britain and then in the United States. Audiences loved it. Dickens didn't simply read from his book. He transformed it into a stageworthy script—cutting, pasting together pages of excised passages, adding stage cues for himself, rewriting, then cutting some more.

Such an annotated stage copy is called a prompt copy. There is only one such copy of A Christmas Carol, created by Dickens himself, and The New York PublicRead More ›

Founded in 1900 by financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina Trask, Yaddo began receiving guests in 1926 and was immediately hailed by The New York Times as “a new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.” Since that inaugural season, Yaddo has navigated the roiled cultural and political life of 20th-century America while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Guston and Sylvia Plath. Richly illustrated with intimate letters, papers,Read More ›

A collaboration between The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the League of Professional Theatre Women, Curtain Call explores the work and the role of distinguished women designing for theater, dance, and opera. Filled with more than 200 images, it features wonderful drawings, photographs, and other artifacts from the  collections of the Performing Arts Library from the late 19th century to the 1950s, as well as the innovative creations of designers from 1960 to the present -- costumes, sketches, set models, lighting designs, and more. Enhanced by interviews with contemporary designers, Curtain Call provides a view behind the curtain that expands uponRead More ›