Over 170,000 book titles were published in the United States during 2007, with Fiction, Juvenile, Sociology, and Economics books comprising over a third of that total.* If you are looking to enter the publishing arena, the Literature Department has many resources to help you achieve your writing goals.
Whether you see yourself as a novelist, screenwriter, poet, journalist, or playwright, the Literature Department has materials that can help you locate an agent or publisher, hone your craft, or stir your creative juices. Click here to see some highlights of the collection.
Cleveland Public Library’s baseball collection in the Social Sciences Department includes many early baseball novels. The infancy of American baseball fiction from the Civil War up to 1910 is very well represented in the Library’s collection. The first mention of baseball in fiction is generally credited to Jane Austen, who uses the word in Northanger Abbey:
“[I]t was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books. . . (p.5.)“
Northanger Abbey was drafted during 1797 and 1798, but Jane Austen continued revising and editing it until 1803. Unfortunately, it was not actually published until 1818. Cleveland Public Library’s collection includes one nineteenth century edition of Northanger Abbey.
Cleveland Public Library's Special Collections Department houses a copy of every Anisfield-Wolf Award winner from the first award in 1936 through today's most recent winners. The library's subject departments also have circulating copies of each of the award winners. The 2008 awards were presented at a reception at the Cleveland Play House on September 11, 2008. They are Junot Diaz for his book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist. William Melvin Kelley was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award and surprise guest Ayaan Hirsi was awarded an award for her best-selling memoir Infidel. Consult our online catalog for a copy of any of these prestigious titles.
One of the Cleveland Public Library's great strengths is its wide-ranging collection of African American authors from Ohio. The following selection of works by African American poets, playwrights, and novelists includes early literary pioneers such as Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar and contemporary writers like Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison.