American Historical and Literary Curiosities, Series One

This is the kind of book that makes you interrupt your dinner companion to read aloud a jaw-dropping fact about Benjamin Franklin's love life, or the strange death of an early American poet, or the elaborate literary hoaxes that fooled an entire generation. J. Jay Smith was a 19th-century antiquarian with an insatiable appetite for the odd, the overlooked, and the genuinely strange in American history and letters. What he assembled in this collection feels less like a textbook and more like a cabinet of wonders: brief portraits of literary figures both famous and forgotten, anecdotes about founding fathers that history books carefully omitted, accounts of literary feuds and forgeries, and curious details about how early Americans read, wrote, and remembered their own culture. Smith wrote with the verve of someone who couldn't wait to share what he'd found, and that electricity still crackles off the page. For anyone who has ever wondered what early Americans were actually like when no one was watching, this collection offers an answer that is funnier, stranger, and more human than any monument could tell you.