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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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W.E.B. Du Bois
1868 — 1963
W.E.B. Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, editor, and activist who spent ninety-five years waging an intellectual war against the lie of white supremacy. He contained a famous contradiction: the ma…
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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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