The Canon in Circulation: Tracking the Reception of Norton Anthology Authors in Library Checkout Data

Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why? We explore this question by analyzing nearly two decades of book circulation data from the Seattle Public Library (SPL), one of the only public libraries in the United States to make anonymized checkout data publicly available. Focusing on the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (NAAL), we examine 1.6k unique works and almost one million checkouts to better understand contemporary literary reception beyond the classroom. We present a novel dataset that can support future reception research and serve as a benchmark for future Work-level clustering approaches. Our findings suggest that the few genre fiction authors in the NAAL—particularly writers of science fiction—dominate the checkouts, and that circulation spikes are often triggered by high-profile media adaptations, the death of an author, and potentially even scandal. We share an open-source, interactive tool that allows users to explore checkout trends for any post-1945 NAAL author or work over the last 20 years.