A book series aimed at World War II soldiers helped popularize works like 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Of Mice and Men.'

2 months after Pearl Harbor, American libraries launched a drive to collect 10 million books for soldiers

The 1942 Victory Book Campaign—sponsored by the American Library Association, the Red Cross, and the USO—asked the public to donate books to both train and entertain troops. The national campaign exceeded its goal, collecting more than 10.2 million books.

Comic books were used as a form of government propaganda in World War II

The government recognized that comic books were widely read by servicemen (with nearly half deeming themselves regular readers) and by people around the world, making it a perfect vehicle for its antifascist, pro-American message. In addition, the medium was rather crude, allowing for what historian Paul Hirsch called "incredibly aggressive propaganda."

Rockwell's 'Four Freedoms' raised millions for the US war effort

Rockwell initially pitched the "Four Freedoms" project to the US Ordnance Department, but was rejected. Rockwell's editor at the Saturday Evening Post, however, loved the idea and published the images across four consecutive issues. After they became a sensation, the Saturday Evening Post partnered with the US Department of the Treasury to send the paintings on a 16-date national tour, which raised $133M in war bonds and stamps. Meanwhile, the Office of War Information printed four million sets of the posters with "Buy War Bonds" emblazoned on them.

The US paperbacks of Tolkien's books led to the popularization of fantasy

Tolkien initially resisted publishing his books in paperback because of the stigma attached to the format, with many believing that serious fiction was first published in hardback. When Ballantine Books eventually published the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in 1965, though, the genre became more popular, leading Ballantine to continue publishing adult fantasy and expanding the genre’s bounds.

A boom hit after WWI, with consumerism usurping frugality as an American value

When American soldiers returned home after WWI in the 1920s, they found a country ready to spend money, make a home, and indulge in creature comforts after wartime rationing. This uptick in US wealth and production led to job opportunities for advertising experts.

Critics are still debating 'the great American novel'

The title has been bandied about since the 19th century, though its definition has only become more debated as time goes on. This list catalogs some of the texts critics have argued deserve the crown (like "The Great Gatsby," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "Invisible Man") and, helpfully, includes those critics’ rationales. Think of it as your new “to read” list—or maybe just something to argue about at your next family gathering.

World War II soldiers received specially-made vinyl records

"V-Discs" were vinyl records featuring popular folk, classical, and jazz songs. This was one of the first widespread uses of vinyl, rather than shellac, records.

Searching for 'The Great Gatsby' in Kentucky

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel "The Great Gatsby" is usually associated with New York and its extremely wealthy enclaves, but this Atlas Obscura podcast tracks down another location Fitzgerald portrayed in the book: Louisville, Kentucky, the setting for Daisy and Tom Buchanan's wedding, as well as the place where Fitzgerald spent two miserable months during World War I.

Circulating libraries helped the novel's popularity surge

As literacy rates began to rise in the 19th century, so did the demand for reading materials. The only problem? Newspapers and books weren’t cheap, and newly literate middle-class families struggled to afford literature. That changed when booksellers began offering small fees for patrons who decided to borrow rather than purchase books. This was eventually called a circulating library, an innovation that would satisfy the burgeoning readership of novels and increase literacy rates further.

Camus edited an underground newspaper during World War II

The paper, called "Combat," was aligned with the French Resistance fighting against the Nazi occupation. Like his fiction, his journalism was clear-eyed: When Hiroshima and Nagaski were bombed, he criticized the many writers impressed with the destruction, writing, "our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery."

The first draft of the classic American novel 'Of Mice and Men' was torn to shreds by John Steinbeck's dog.

Dystopian satire became more prominent in the 20th century

Although "anti-utopian" stories have always existed, the international conflicts of World War I and World War II inspired some of dystopian literature’s most influential novels, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "We," Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World," and George Orwell’s "1984." In the decades to follow, more writers would follow the example of those early novels, using the dystopian model to critique artificial intelligence, climate change, and more.

The GI Bill helped expand formal jazz education

Berklee School of Music (then known as the Schillinger House) and a program at the University of North Texas (then known as Texas State University) established academia's earliest jazz programs in 1945. The GI Bill provided World War II veterans with educational funding, which helped the programs proliferate: By the end of the 1960s, there were 450 college jazz ensembles.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

How literary agent Scott Meredith invented the modern book auction

Prior to the 1964 auction of "The Night Action" for $13,500 to New American Library, a gentleman's code persisted in the literary world: no manuscript should be shared with more than one publisher at a time. Meredith—the agent behind Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke—leveraged his deep knowledge of the talent pool to publishers, sending around manuscripts to 19 different publishers to generate a bidding war. The Beat-influenced novel eventually flopped and is now out of print.

The Beats also influenced the imagery of the 1960s

First editions of Burroughs’s "The Naked Lunch," Kerouac’s "The Dharma Bums," and Ferlinghetti’s "A Coney Island of the Mind" were just as notable for their text as they were for their design, which anticipated the psychedelic imagery of 1960s countercultural touchstones like Ken Kesey, Andy Warhol, and R. Crumb.

The opening chapters of bestselling novels are thousands of words shorter than they were in the 1950s

Novels like "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Lord of the Flies" averaged opening chapters with about 4,500 words. Titles from the 2020s, on the other hand, including "Fourth Wing" and "Lessons in Chemistry," are closer to 2,500 words.

Read the works of Mark Twain

Twain's books are in the public domain, meaning they can be freely distributed. Digital versions of his classic novels—including "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"—as well as many of his short stories and satirical essays can be accessed through Project Gutenberg.

Winston Churchill said he was comforted by 'Pride and Prejudice' during World War II

The prime minister was bedridden in a hospital with pneumonia in 1943. In his memoirs, Churchill recalls how Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" comforted him, especially because its characters remained calm amid the political turbulence of the time.

Baum wrote 14 'Oz' novels in total

Following the success of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,’ Baum continued writing about the fictional world until his death, turning the world into a lucrative brand. One of the books, “The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” was turned into a silent film and released in 1914.

In 1938, 1.7 million people were fooled into believing a Martian invasion was underway because of a radio play

Orson Welles' realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth, called "The War of the Worlds," caused quite a stir with audiences. The broadcast resulted in panic, with some people in the area where the story took place attempting to flee. It also helped Welles secure a contract with a Hollywood studio, leading to the creation of "Citizen Kane."

Pulitzer's newspapers were intended for the masses

His newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, transformed journalism by marketing to a mass audience rather than just the elite.

The nonfiction book that kick-started Orwell's career

1935's "The Road to Wigan Pier" was a piece of investigative journalism that explored how the impoverished were handling the Great Depression, known in England as "the Slump." Orwell divided the book into two parts: One that described the living conditions of the working poor, and the other that criticized middle-class socialists' ineffectiveness at helping them.

Scale models show the intricacy of WWI trench warfare

Every inch of these models of WWI soldiers in the trenches is crafted with amazing details, right down to the real-life letters written to home.

Many of Spielberg's films were inspired by childhood experiences

Steven Spielberg was inspired to make “Saving Private Ryan” after seeing the toll war took on his father’s generation. Similarly, he felt called to direct “Schindler’s List” by the Holocaust survivors he met when he was only three years old.

Penicillin slashed battlefield pneumonia deaths during World War II

Before antibiotics, bacterial pneumonia killed about 18% of infected soldiers in World War I. By World War II, penicillin cut that death rate to less than 1%.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Explore an interactive map of battles from the American Revolution, along with detailed summaries of each engagement

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.