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The Library of Congress National Book Festival: the room where the receipts live, the Harlem Hellfighters, and a conversation with Max Brooks.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — America has a favorite hobby: reflection, specifically the kind where the nation stares lovingly at its own highlight reel and calls it history. On Saturday, August 22, the Library of Congress offered something better than a montage. It opened the doors of the 26th annual National Book Festival and invited the country to spend a full day with the written word, in all its unruly, generous, wonderfully human forms.
Held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center under the theme “America 250: It’s Your Story,” the festival felt like a national treasure doing exactly what a national treasure should do: opening itself up. The theme was not a question posed from a podium. It was an invitation extended across the room, generous enough to include the stories already written, the stories still emerging, and the parts of the American story we are still learning to tell better.
That welcome had a practical shape. Admission was free for everyone, with general-entry ticketing used to manage the crowds rather than to build a velvet rope. Doors opened at 8:30 a.m.; programming ran from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Select sessions were livestreamed, and videos were posted afterward, extending the gift beyond Washington so readers nationwide could join in. A book festival this large has to count heads. It does not have to count people out.
A NATIONAL TREASURE, OPEN TO EVERYONE
The best arrival advice was also the simplest: take the train to Mount Vernon Square Metro. Street closures connected to the Freedom 250 Grand Prix made driving needlessly complicated, while the Metro made the Convention Center easy to reach and left visitors free to think about books instead of parking. Inside, the Main Stage in Ballroom BC anchored the day; the Library of Congress Pavilion, Story District and STEM District filled Hall D; Politics and Prose handled book sales; and signing areas in Halls A and B kept the author-reader exchange moving. Individual sessions and signings remained first come, first served, a system that rewards both planning and the occasional lucky turn down a hallway.
Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen and festival co-chair David M. Rubenstein led a program that made the Library’s mission visible: preserve American memory, keep it accessible, and keep adding to it. More than eighty authors appeared across genres and generations. Ann Patchett, recipient of the 2026 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, shared the roster with Tayari Jones, Andrew Sean Greer, Tom Perrotta, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Brooks, Martin Scorsese and Michael Feinstein. The lineup was expansive without being random, a reminder that American letters are not one lane of traffic but an entire city with the lights on.
The scenes between the formal sessions supplied their own kind of literature. Children sprinted between stages like they were navigating a literacy obstacle course. Long lines curled through the building, not as a complaint but as evidence of a community choosing to spend a Saturday with books. Volunteers made the whole enterprise look effortless, which is the most convincing proof that they were working very hard. Everywhere, readers compared notes, found new authors, and carried purchases that looked less like merchandise than souvenirs from a shared civic day.
That breadth was the point. The festival was proof that reading is alive, that thousands of people will still show up for ideas, and that the largest library on earth is doing its job of keeping the American story open to everyone. Its hybrid model made the invitation wider; its crowded halls made it tangible. The theme’s promise was not that every story arrives finished or perfectly told. It was that the story belongs to all of us, including the chapters we are still learning how to write, hear and honor.
And if America has a signature move, it’s this: take a real story, sand it down into a motivational poster, and then act surprised when the unsanded version shows up and starts asking questions.
So when I sat down with Max Brooks ahead of his National Book Festival session, the conversation wasn’t really about zombies, or even about genre. It was about memory, who gets to keep it, who gets edited out of it, and how long the country can pretend it “lost the paperwork.”
Brooks was there to talk about The Harlem Hellfighters, his graphic novel about the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Men of Bronze, the unit that spent 191 days in the trenches and still had to come home and negotiate Jim Crow like it was an administrative setting.
And here’s the part where I talk to you, the reader, directly: if you’re going to attend a festival called It’s Your Story, you should probably be prepared to meet the parts of the story that were never meant to be widely circulated.
The Harlem Hellfighters are a useful answer because their record is both celebrated and repeatedly misplaced. The men were asked to defend democracy abroad while being managed as a threat at home. They were then praised after the fact, slowly and selectively, as if the country had to conduct a century-long search for the correct filing cabinet.
THE MEN OF BRONZE
The 369th Infantry Regiment began as the 15th New York (Colored) Infantry. Germans called them the Harlem Hellfighters. French allies called them Hommes de Bronze, the Men of Bronze. They spent 191 days in the front-line trenches, the longest continuous combat deployment of any American unit in World War I. The number is impressive. The context is the part that keeps it from becoming a commemorative mug.
In 1917, the regiment entered a war against the Central Powers and against Jim Crow. W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Close Ranks” editorial urged Black Americans to support the war effort, with the expectation that patriotic sacrifice might strengthen the claim to full citizenship. Woodrow Wilson’s segregated administration offered a less generous interpretation of the bargain. The Houston Riot of August 1917, followed by the execution of 24th Infantry soldiers, made clear what the federal government thought armed Black men were allowed to be.
At Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the 15th New York encountered open hostility. Training sometimes meant broomsticks instead of rifles. When the regiment reached Brest in December 1917, the U.S. Army assigned it to the Service of Supplies, where trained infantrymen were ordered into manual labor, ship unloading and road work. The official racist line was that Black soldiers lacked the intelligence, courage and coordination required for modern combat. The line had the advantage of being wrong and the disadvantage of being repeated by people with paperwork.
TWO WARS AT ONCE
General John Pershing refused to amalgamate Black and white American troops. Under pressure from French command, he instead “loaned” the Black regiments of the 93rd Division to the French. It was an act of disposal that became an opportunity. Under General Henri Gouraud’s French Fourth Army, the 369th received French Adrian helmets, Lebel rifles and French rations. The men recovered in integrated hospitals, mingled with civilians and served in a military society without the formalized Jim Crow structure they had known in the United States.
That distinction was not abstract. Equality was a lived environment: who shared a ward, who ate beside whom, who was trusted with a weapon, who was allowed to be seen as a soldier rather than a laborer. The French did not need to be saints to recognize military competence. They needed troops who could hold ground. The 369th gave them exactly that.
During the Aisne-Marne and Meuse-Argonne offensives, the regiment fought with a ferocity that repeatedly outpaced the units on its flanks. In September 1918, it captured Séchault and advanced 14 kilometers through fierce German resistance. The men were not merely present at the front. They were defining it.
In one of the war’s defining close-quarters fights, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts repulsed a 24-man German raiding party. When Johnson’s rifle jammed, he used it as a club until the stock broke, then used a bolo knife to keep Roberts from being taken prisoner. France responded with the Croix de Guerre, making Johnson and Roberts the first Americans to receive the honor. On December 13, 1918, General Georges Lebouc pinned the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star to the regiment’s colors. One hundred seventy-one individual soldiers were decorated.
THE HOMECOMING THAT WASN’T
The homecoming in February 1919 looked like the kind of national image that survives forever. The regiment marched up Fifth Avenue to enormous crowds. James Reese Europe’s band supplied the sound, carrying syncopation from Harlem to France and back again. For a moment, the country’s most public avenue made room for the evidence.
Then came the letdown. Red Summer arrived with racial violence across the country, and Black veterans were targeted while wearing the uniforms in which they had just defended the nation. The uniform represented dignity and status. That was precisely the problem for people committed to denying both.
Du Bois captured the new posture in a sentence that still sounds like a door being kicked open: “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” The Hellfighters had seen a society in France where military equality could be practiced rather than promised. They came home less willing to accept second-class citizenship as a permanent administrative setting. Their experience helped form the ideological foundation of the Double V campaign in World War II: victory over fascism abroad, victory over racism at home.
The regiment’s contribution to society was therefore larger than battlefield success. The 369th permanently fractured the psychological landscape of American white supremacy. It proved, in public and under fire, that Black soldiers were equal to any soldiers on earth. It gave later organizers a record that could not be dismissed as aspiration. The country could delay recognition, distort memory and lose paperwork, but it could not make the record un-happen.
THE PEOPLE WHO KEPT THE RECORD ALIVE
Arthur W. Little, a white publisher and commander, used his position to preserve what institutions preferred to minimize. His 1936 memoir, From Harlem to the Rhine, documented the regiment’s combat record and the racism it faced. Little’s account mattered partly because his social standing made it harder for skeptical white readers to dismiss the testimony. He put the facts in print, where erasure had to work harder.
Eugene Bullard’s life supplied a parallel indictment. Born in Georgia, Bullard fled the violence of the Jim Crow South, joined the French Foreign Legion and became the first Black combat pilot. His plane carried the motto “All Blood Runs Red.” France honored him; the American military rejected his attempt to transfer into U.S. aviation. Later he worked as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center, endured violence at the 1949 Peekskill riots and was still obscure enough that, when Charles de Gaulle asked American officials about him in 1960, they did not know where he was. France did.
James Reese Europe was the regiment’s cultural architect. Before the war, he founded the Clef Club and became the first Black bandleader to perform at Carnegie Hall. He recruited 18 Afro-Puerto Rican musicians, including a young Rafael Hernández, and introduced French audiences to a new American sound. Europe was murdered in May 1919, only months after the parade. The music outlived him, which is both a tribute and a familiar historical insult.
Modern recognition has arrived in installments. Henry Johnson received the Medal of Honor in 2015, nearly a century after his heroism. Congress awarded the regiment the Congressional Gold Medal in 2021. The National Museum of African American History and Culture places the unit within exhibits on “We Return Fighting” and “Double Victory.” Bisa Butler’s quilt at the Renwick Gallery turns a 1919 photograph of Hellfighters into a monument of color and textile, stitching a delayed Congressional Gold Medal onto the soldiers’ chests. Art, in this case, is not decoration. It is a correction.
THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T GIVE UP
Brooks framed The Harlem Hellfighters the way it deserves to be framed: as the true story of African-American soldiers in 1917 who signed up to “make the world safe for democracy,” while their own government treated them like a political hazard.
Not an inconvenience. A hazard.
Because if those men went overseas, fought well, and came home decorated, they’d return with proof. Proof that the excuses were lies. Proof that “not ready” was never about readiness. Proof that democracy was being rationed.
So, Brooks said, the system tried to sabotage them anyway.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a recurring American genre.
Max Brooks first heard about the Hellfighters when he was 11. He assumed the story would become a movie. He waited through Glory, the HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen and Buffalo Soldiers. Hollywood continued to demonstrate that there are many ways to say no while preserving the appearance of a conversation.
Dakota: You wrote the movie script yourself and pitched it around Hollywood. What happened?
Max Brooks: “I was told, every conceivable way, no. They said, listen, you don’t understand. This is the ’90s, all right? This is the American Pie era. So unless you have your soldiers doing sexual things to a dessert, we’re not interested.”
Brooks nearly stopped. Then he met LeVar Burton, who told him the script came closest to the truth and that he should not give up. Years later, after World War Z gave Brooks what he called “mojo,” he was asked what he wanted to do next. He chose the Hellfighters and chose a graphic novel on purpose.
Max Brooks: “I don’t want to do it as a novel, because it’s easy to forget, when you’re reading it, what color these guys were. But as a comic book, you’re constantly reminded on every page. Plus, I wanted to reach a younger audience who didn’t know this.”
The Harlem Hellfighters, illustrated by Caanan White and published in 2014 by Broadway Books/Crown Publishing Group, runs 272 pages. Its form is not a shortcut around history. It is a way of forcing proximity. Prose can be skimmed. A panel of a man bleeding in mud is more stubborn. The art makes the cost visible, and once the cost is visible, the excuses become less elegant.
Brooks also met families connected to the story when the Hellfighters received the Congressional Gold Medal. He met Jim Europe’s family and Noble Sissle Jr., who went on to create the Black Screen Actors Guild. Europe’s relative obscurity, Brooks noted, remains hard to explain except as another case of the American memory system misplacing the people who built the culture it later sells.
“JUST GO OUT AND BE ONE”
The festival’s Hellfighters session was scheduled to become something more than a discussion of an old book. Brooks and the production team were turning The Harlem Hellfighters into a radio play, bringing the story from graphic panels into live performance. A scene would be read on stage with real actors. The format changes. The obligation does not.
That evolution mirrors Brooks’s larger body of work. World War Z, the zombie survival guide universe and The Harlem Hellfighters all use genre as a way to carry real history and real warnings past the gatekeepers. Zombies make systems visible by breaking them. The Hellfighters make systems visible by surviving them. In both cases, Brooks treats people as human beings trapped inside machines that need them and do not respect them.
The final question was for the kid in a small town who wants to become a writer. Brooks did not offer a branding strategy, a platform plan or a reassuring promise that the market would be kind. He offered permission, which is usually more useful.
Max Brooks: “If you want to be a writer, you write. That’s it. … You have to have the discipline to write it down and you have to have the ego to think that you deserve to write it down. But how great is it if you want to be a writer that you’re in a profession where nobody gets to stop you? No one has to let you be a writer. Just go out and be one.”
The Harlem Hellfighters were told they could not fight, could not lead, could not be trusted with the full meaning of citizenship. They did anyway. They came home to a country that took nearly a century to say thank you. Max Brooks refused to let the story die, which is its own kind of courage: not the courage of a charge across open ground, but the courage of returning to the same locked door until the history on the other side is finally allowed out.
The 369th paid in full. America is still pretending it lost the receipt. Thanks to a graphic novel, a radio play and one very stubborn author, the receipt is now impossible to ignore.
A Q&A ABOUT DYSLEXIA, DOUBT, AND WORKAROUNDS
The conversation moved from the Hellfighters to Brooks’s own education. He described struggling in school while teachers assumed that, because his parents were Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, he was simply a privileged child refusing to apply himself. One teacher told him, “You can do this. You just don’t want to.” His aunt Phyllis, a schoolteacher, suggested dyslexia. The Marianne Frostig Center tested him and confirmed it.
Max Brooks: “The dyslexia turned out to be maybe 30% of the problem. But the anxiety, the doubt, that’s huge.”
Brooks described the school system as built on a Prussian model designed for the Industrial Revolution: standardization, rote memorization, regurgitation under a ticking clock. The school bell sounds like a factory bell, he said, because it was meant to train factory workers. That system worked well for the system. It did not work well for every brain inside it.
His mother fought for accommodations before individualized education programs were a familiar term. She found audio solutions through the Braille Institute, turning schoolbooks into recordings. When penmanship threatened his grades, she made him take a typing course. He hated it. It saved his life. His parents even tap-danced at the Crossroads Cabaret to keep him from being expelled, which is the kind of family intervention that suggests both desperation and an unusually committed relationship to show business.
Dakota: What do you tell the child and family who are still struggling?
Max Brooks: “You have to work smart as well as hard. Because the problem is, with a lot of kids who are learning disabled, if you keep banging your head against a wall, then you develop a level of anxiety and doubt. And then that becomes the problem.”
That advice extends beyond dyslexia. Find the workaround. Reduce the anxiety. Do not confuse a system’s preferred method with the only possible method. Brooks’s mother did not make him into a different kind of brain. She helped build a bridge between his brain and the work.
Zombies, Gardens, and the Gen X Bubble
Yes we asked the question! What would he would bring to a zombie apocalypse? Brooks offered a practical résumé: he figures out what could go wrong, he is naturally neurotic, and he is a very good vegetable gardener. Before lockdown, he bought every lettuce, spinach and kale seedling he could find and lived off the garden for six months.
This is not the traditional Hollywood survival skill, but it is more useful than looking excellent while running.
World War Z, he said, was based on SARS. The premise had been built around the possibility of a disease beginning in China, being covered up and then spreading beyond the ability of institutions to contain it. Brooks’s reaction to seeing a version of that nightmare arrive in real life was simple: “It’s not a good feeling.”
He also described Gen X as a generation that mistook a temporary calm for normality. They had cars, movies and television, and a childhood that felt like a stable bubble. “We had this bubble where we thought this is normal,” he said. “It’s not normal.” The lesson was not to become paralyzed by change, but to understand that radical flux is the baseline and the John Hughes movie was the unusual event.
And that’s the connective tissue, really: trenches, classrooms, algorithms, zombies. Different costumes, same story. Systems fail. People adapt. The question is whether we learn anything before the next failure arrives with better marketing.
THE ALGORITHM IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
On the modern information environment, Brooks was less nostalgic than diagnostic. The internet offers more resources than his generation had, but also more noise and more commercial pressure. Algorithms, he said, are not democratic. They are companies in the business of attention and dopamine.
For children of Brooks’s generation, the enemy was Hostess cupcakes and jawbreakers. For today’s children, it is the screen. The machinery is similar: laboratories, incentives and a detailed understanding of what keeps a person reaching for one more hit. “Thank God Hitler didn’t have TikTok,” Brooks said. It was a joke. It was also a historical argument about how propaganda scales when the delivery system is personalized and always on.
The same logic informed his advice on artificial intelligence. AI can improve what it already knows, he said, but it cannot create in the human sense. That makes genuine oddness useful.
Max Brooks: “To be an oddball, to be weird, to be something unique is now an asset because it used to be something against you. If you want to survive being automated, you have to be as authentically you as possible.”
The answer is not to pretend technology does not exist. It is to keep the part of the self that cannot be reduced to a pattern. This is a useful idea for writers, students, journalists and anyone whose work is about noticing what the machine has missed.
A PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY FOR CREATORS (AND FOR ANYONE TRYING TO STAY HUMAN): BE WEIRD ON PURPOSE
When our conversation moved into the modern information environment’s algorithms, AI Brooks stayed consistent. He argued algorithms aren’t “democratic.” They’re engineered for attention and dopamine. They reward shouting, fear, and tribal division because those emotions keep people scrolling.
On AI specifically, Brooks said something that lands like a creative directive: AI can’t create in the human sense; it can only remix what it already knows. So authenticity—real oddness, real specificity—isn’t just a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy.
His advice to the aspiring writer was stripped down to its simplest form:
- If you want to be a writer, write.
- Don’t wait for permission.
- Nobody has to “let” you do it.
If you want to be a writer, you write. That’s it. — Max Brooks
INVEST IN THE RECORD BEFORE IT GETS “LOST” AGAIN
If you’re going to show up for a festival that says It’s Your Story, then act like it.
1. Buy the book. Not because consumption is activism, but because attention is a budget, and this story has been underfunded for a century.
2. Read it like it’s evidence. Because it is.
3. Put it in someone else’s hands. A younger reader. A reluctant reader. The person in your life who thinks World War I is just sepia photos and speeches.
4. Show up for the live formats when you can—festival sessions, readings, radio plays… because the point of performance is that it creates witnesses.
America loves a parade. The harder job is the archive. And if you’re waiting for the country to tell this story correctly on its own schedule, well, don’t. Max Brooks already tried that.
If you want to be a writer, you write. That’s it. … You have to have the discipline to write it down and you have to have the ego to think that you deserve to write it down. But how great is it if you want to be a writer that you’re in a profession where nobody gets to stop you? No one has to let you be a writer. Just go out and be one.
