The Library

Alexander the Great

323 BCE · Babylon

Dying at thirty-two in Babylon, a conqueror dictates the truth his generals will try to bury.

Abraham Lincoln

1865 · White House, Washington

In the final winter of the Civil War, a president confronts the distance between saving the Union and saving himself.

Adolf Hitler

1913 · A working men's hostel in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, spring 1913 (the Männerheim, Meldemannstraße 27, XX. Bezirk; the figure resident since February 1910 and three weeks from departing for München).

A failed Academy of Fine Arts entrance candidate of twenty-four sits at the writing and painting table of a working men's hostel in the Brigittenau district of Vienna in the spring of 1913, paints a view postcard of t...

Adolf Hitler

1923 · Munich

Munich, 1923.

Adolf Hitler

1924 · Landsberg fortress prison (the Festungshaft cell where the dictation is conducted), Bavaria

A failed putschist sits in a fortress cell dictating a book that assembles his personal grievances and the doctrines of his small party into a single system of self-justification, converting the catastrophe of Novembe...

Adolf Hitler

1942 · Germany / occupied Europe

Germany, 1942.

Adolf Hitler

1945 · A sealed command bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden, Berlin, late April 1945 (the Führerbunker; the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov closing on the city centre; days before the figure's suicide on 30 April 1945).

In a sealed command bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin in late April 1945, with the Soviet armies closing on the city centre and the relief attack he ordered found not to have been made, the head of...

Augustus

13 AD · Rome

At Rome, with his body failing faster than his patience, the first emperor sets down the cost of manufacturing peace.

Anne Boleyn

1536 · Tower of London

In the Tower of London, waiting for a verdict she already knows, a queen sets down what Henry will never allow to be read.

Akbar the Great

1605 · Agra

In Agra, in the forty-ninth year of his reign, an emperor who united faiths confronts the impossibility of succession.

Alexander Hamilton

1804 · New York

In the summer before the duel, the architect of American finance sets down what the republic he built will never credit him for.

Ada Lovelace

1852 · London

In London, with her body failing, the woman who saw the potential of computing before anyone else sets down what the numbers meant.

Antoine Lavoisier

1794 · Luxembourg Prison, Paris

Under guard in the Luxembourg Prison, a chemist who transformed science waits to learn whether the Revolution will let him live.

Alexander Graham Bell

1921 · Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia

Hearing little now except the inner rushing of his own blood, the inventor of the telephone reflects on the sounds that changed everything.

Amelia Earhart

1937 · Lae, New Guinea

In the heavy heat of Lae, with the hardest leg of the flight ahead, a pilot who redefined what women could do writes what the headlines never captured.

Albrecht Dürer

1528 · Nuremberg

I am fifty-six years old and the body has been in decline since Zeeland, since the marsh air and the whale I did not properly see and the fever or corruption I brought back with me as if a journey could not be counted...