Books From Indiana That Everyone Should Check Out | American Stories: A Reading Road Trip

Fasten your seatbelt and join PBS Books and the Library of Congress for our next stop in American Stories: A Reading Road Trip: Indiana! Join us on December 10th at 8pm EST for a PBS Books Facebook Live event, or on the PBS Books YouTube channel, the PBS app, or pbs.org. Visit pbsbooks.org/readingroadtrip to learn more.

At the crossroads of America lies Indiana—a state with a literary culture as golden as an ear of corn. The Golden Age of Indiana literature gave us treasures like Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, James Whitcomb Riley's poetry about Little Orphan Annie, Lew Wallace's epic Ben-Hur, and Gene Stratton-Porter's environmentally conscious A Girl of the Limberlost. The 1960s and '70s ushered in a powerful movement of Black writers, including poets Mari Evans (I Am a Black Woman) and Etheridge Knight (Poems from Prison). The Hoosier state has also brought us beloved cartoon characters like Garfield and Clifford the Big Red Dog. And no conversation about Indiana literature would be complete without Kurt Vonnegut’s dark and poignant novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five.

Today's Hoosier writers are carrying that torch forward with equal brilliance. Hear from Newbery Award winner Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, who takes on difficult topics for kids delicately in novels like Fighting Words; YA author Leah Johnson, who shines a spotlight on underrepresented voices like You Should See Me in a Crown; and bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler, who drew inspiration from her Bloomington childhood in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

This layered literary past has left landmarks throughout the state—from museums and murals to authors' homes and locations featured in books like the Funky Bones sculpture in Newfields from John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. Indiana also boasts remarkable bookstores and libraries, including more Carnegie libraries than any other state.

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