A Book Lover’s Guide to Washington, DC
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When you think of Washington, DC, the city’s literary scene does not immediately spring to mind. “The federal government overshadows everything,” Kim Roberts, a local literary historian and poet, tells T&C, “DC is like a company town, or a resort town—where there’s one industry that overshadows everything. But as longtime DC residents will attest, there’s a huge difference between the federal city and the city of neighborhoods.”
Books about DC immediately call to mind presidential memoirs or books by former first ladies, or tell-alls by White House staffers. But there’s a thriving literary scene in the District, and one that is often overlooked. “There’s an underdog status of the art scene here,” Roberts explains. “I’ve lived in other cities where it’s felt more competitive, and people feel like there’s limited resources—in DC in general, the arts community is very generous. We know we have to support one another. I love that. I love that spirit of generosity. It means that writers coming from very different backgrounds and writing in very different styles, still come out to each other’s readings and buy each other’s books and support one another.”
Over a decade ago, Roberts and fellow literary historian and poet Dan Vera launched DC Writers’ Homes, which maps nearly 400 homes of famous DC writers, from Julia Child to Langston Hughes. “What I love about doing this work, most particularly, is that it deepens my sense of connection to place,” Roberts says. “I can walk down any given street and know, oh, this is where Walt Whitman once worked. This is where Zora Neale Hurston rented rooms. To me, it creates a layered sense of place, and it’s just a different way of claiming the city as my own.”
A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston
If you’re traveling to DC and hoping to seek out the city’s deep cultural history, Roberts’s A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is a must read, and a great foundation for a walking tour. (She’s also the author of the forthcoming Buried Stories: Walking Tours of Washington-Area Cemeteries, out this October.) Plus, if you want to shop local while you’re visiting Washington, DC, she recommends Loyalty Books, located at 4203 9th St NW, “a small independent bookstore that is owned by a queer person of color. So they have really good diverse selection,” and Politics & Prose, which carries many local authors and has what she says is a “great reading series.” (Politics & Prose now has three locations: 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, 610 Water St SW, and 1324 4th Street NE.)
A key part of her work emphasizes the Black writers who shaped American literature, and their deep roots in DC. “What we now call the Harlem Renaissance—named after, obviously, a neighborhood in New York—during the Harlem Renaissance, no one called it that. That was a name that was put on it later. If they called it anything during its time, they would've called it ‘the New Negro Renaissance’ after an anthology called The New Negro that was edited by Alain Locke, a DC resident,” she explains. “The New Negro Renaissance, you could make a strong argument, actually started in DC, but we get forgotten because of the later name of the Harlem Renaissance. But DC during the 1920s was much more affordable to live in than New York, which is important. Middle class African Americans could afford to buy in neighborhoods in the central part of DC, so it was a stable enough position, economic position from which to start an art movement. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer—some of the people who later spent time in New York started their careers in DC.”
Here, Roberts also shared with T&C some of her favorite DC classics:
Democracy: An American Novel (Penguin Classics)
First published in 1880, Henry Adams’s novel has never gone out of print. The story follows a young widow, Madeleine Lee, who comes to DC and is pursued by influential Senator Silas Ratcliffe.
Heartburn (Vintage Contemporaries)
Nora Ephron’s first novel was autobiographical in nature, referencing her marriage and divorce from Carl Bernstein. The story follows Rachel, a Jewish New Yorker who moved to DC to support her political journalist husband’s career.
Odyssey to the North
Translated from the Spanish by Susan Giersbach Rascón, Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North follows the journey of Calixto, an immigrant from Central America who end up in the DMV area. Published in 1998, the novel remains ever relevant.
The Exorcist: A Novel
First published in 1971, The Exorcist is a classic horror novel—and a classic DC novel, about the demonic possession of Regan, the 11-year-old daughter of a movie actress residing in Washington, DC.
Cane (Penguin Classics)
DC writer Jean Toomer’s Cane is “one of the earliest masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance period,” according to Roberts. It combined poems and short fiction, and is set in rural Georgia and DC.
When Washington Was in Vogue: A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance
In this epistolary novel, World War I veteran Davy writes to an old friend in Harlem about DC’s Black community and the state of racial politics in America.
Roberts also shared with DC some of her favorite contemporary novels and short stories, noting that “you could do a whole Lincoln sub-genre!”
Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
George Saunders’s critically acclaimed 2017 novel follows the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie. Mourning at his son’s crypt, Abraham enters a supernatural realm where he meets spirits who are unable to move on to the afterlife.
Creatures of Passage
In this 2021 magical realism novel, Nephthys is a DC taxi driver who ferries lost souls. “DC is a landscape like no other because it is a place where the terror and wonder of life exist side by side, where hidden realities lay just below glittering myth—the perfect conditions for the fantastical,” author Morowa Yejidé explains.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu’s 2008 novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the Ethiopian Revolution and himself running a failing grocery store in a poor DC neighborhood.
Lost in the City: Stories
This collection of short fiction by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones focuses on the lives of African American men and women in DC.
Mother of Sorrows
Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows is ten interwoven stories of an American family in postwar suburban DC.
Henry and Clara
The night Lincoln was assassinated, he and Mary Todd were joined at Ford’s Theater by Clara Harris and her fiancée, Henry Rathborne. Thomas Mallon’s novel recreates the lives of this tragic couple.
Grief: A Novel
An unnamed, middle aged gay man is grieving the loss of his mother as he reads the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln in this moving novel by Andrew Holleran.
Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City
David Nicholson’s short stories center the working men and women of DC. “Secret City” is a phrase taken from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1932 essay about “Colored Washington.” Aas Nicholson notes, “Much has changed since Du Bois wrote but, in many ways, black Washington remains a secret city, invisible to the whites who also inhabit it.”
River, Cross My Heart: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
In the historical fiction novel River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke, a young girl, Clara, drowns in the Potomac River, and the fallout is intense. Her family leaves their rural North Carolina community to be among friends and relatives in C.
Top image: Zora Neale Hurston at a book fair.
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