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Collection Growing
Additional voices are being prepared for this hall. Each new figure requires months of corpus ingestion and persona research before joining the collection.
H.L. Mencken
1880 — 1956
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) — reporter and editorial writer for the Baltimore Sun for four decades, co-editor of The Smart Set, founder and editor of The American Mercury, author of The American Language…
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Jane Jacobs
1916 — 2006
The legendary urbanist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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George Orwell
1903 — 1950
George Orwell was a British journalist, essayist, and novelist who made truth-telling under political pressure into the defining act of his life, producing work that cut through the propaganda of both…
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James Baldwin
1924–1987
James Baldwin was a novelist, essayist, and playwright who wrote from the intersection of race, sexuality, and national identity with a precision that still feels like an accusation and a love letter …
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Frederick Law Olmsted
1822 — 1903
The father of American landscape architecture and designer of Central Park — who believed that shared public green space was a democratic necessity, not a luxury.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 — 1882
The philosopher who quit the pulpit to preach a harder sermon: trust yourself, even when every institution tells you not to. He gave Thoreau his first journal and invented American self-reliance. He is more interesting than his slogans suggest.
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Henry David Thoreau
1817 — 1862
He built a cabin at Walden Pond, lived simply for two years, refused to pay his poll tax, spent a night in jail, and wrote the books that became the theory of the good life and the foundation of nonviolent resistance. He was also, by his own measure, impatient with nearly everything.
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Ida B. Wells
1862 — 1931
She investigated every lynching she could document, compiled the statistics, and proved the stated justifications were false. Then she published the evidence. Her newspaper was destroyed and she was driven from Memphis. She kept writing.
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Mark Twain
1835 — 1910
Riverboat pilot, prospector, satirist, and America's most dangerous humorist. He turned Huck Finn's moral crisis into the most important sentence in American literature. He spent his last years writing things too dark to publish. He's ready now.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
1811 — 1896
She wrote the novel Lincoln reportedly called the book that started the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year. She is honest about what it got wrong. She believed narrative had a power that argument alone could not match.
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Oscar Wilde
1854 — 1900
The Dublin wit who made aestheticism a public performance, wrote the perfect comedy, and in the same month of 1895 brought the libel suit that put him in Reading Gaol for two years. He wrote De Profundis inside and the Ballad on the way out, and died exiled and bankrupt in Paris at forty-six. He wronged his wife and lost his sons' name, and he knows it.
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Charles Dickens
1812 — 1870
The blacking-factory boy who became the most famous writer alive at twenty-four and built the workhouse, the Marshalsea, Chancery and Coketown into the English imagination, in parts a nation waited for at the docks. He ran two magazines and a home for fallen women, fought America over copyright, and read himself to death. In 1858 he left his wife of twenty-two years and printed a statement about her in his own magazine.
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Walt Whitman
1819 — 1892
The printer who set the type for his own first edition, invented a line for democracy, and spent three years of the war beside the wounded in Washington with oranges and writing paper. He wrote the elegy for Lincoln and asked in Democratic Vistas whether the republic had a soul to match its wealth. He also reviewed his own book anonymously and invented six children for an Englishman who asked too many questions.
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Ida M. Tarbell
1857 — 1944
The oil-region daughter who spent five years in court records and legislative testimony to show how Rockefeller built the Standard Oil trust on secret railroad rebates. He never answered her; the Supreme Court did, in 1911. She hated the word muckraker, opposed the vote for women, and came home from Rome in 1926 admiring Mussolini.
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G. K. Chesterton
1874 — 1936
The twenty-stone Fleet Street journalist who wrote eighty books and four thousand essays, invented Father Brown, debated Shaw and Wells as friends, fought eugenics when it was respectable, and defended small property against plutocrat and state alike. In The New Jerusalem he asked that English Jews wear distinctive dress; he must answer for it.
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