A listing of Kansas City’s greatest literary hits almost certainly will touch on Ernest Hemingway and Calvin Trillin, on the Bridges (Mr. and Mrs.), on illuminating texts about jazz and the Negro Leagues and the raucous era of Boss Tom Pendergast.

Depending on who’s doing the selecting, it also could extend to Charles Coulter’s Take Up the Black Man's Burden: Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865-1939, an essential history of Black life in the city after the Civil War and under Jim Crow law. Or to A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes’ memoir of overcoming orphanhood and poverty as a youth in the Northeast part of town.

Former Kansas City Star writer and editor Steve Paul joins Kaite Stover, the Library’s director of readers’ services, in discussing their list of Kansas City-connected books that have left the greatest imprint on the literary world – titles chronicling the history of the city and its people, or set in the city, or written by Kansas City authors.

This program is part of the Library's 2021 Summer Reading Program - Homegrown Stories. Learn more at kclibrary.org/summerreading.