The Hay-Adams Author Series
20th Anniversary

Hear from author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress Marie Arana about the evolution of our Celebrating the Arts Author Series,
now in its 20th year.   

A Literary Legacy: On 20 Years of The Hay-Adams' Author Series 

by Marie Arana

I can recall vividly the moment that Kay Enokido invited me to lunch to talk about launching a literary series at The Hay-Adams. By then, we had known each other for decades. We had met in Asia when we were twenty-something expatriates. When I met her again, a quarter of a century later, she was president of The Hay-Adams, one of the most historic establishments in the capital of the United States.

At that lunch, which took place in the Lafayette Restaurant of The Hay-Adams, Kay explained that we were sitting on the very same street corner that John Milton Hay and Henry Brooks Adams had inhabited almost a century and a half before. Best friends as well as passionate bookworms, they had decided to build houses next to each other on a plot of land just a few steps from the White House, where they could preside over interesting conversations together. 

John Hay had been a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and would become Lincoln’s most meticulous biographer; eventually, he would serve as Secretary of State under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. But, apart from his work in diplomacy, Hay was a poet and a voracious reader, and, in time, his appetite for literature would bring him into the heady intellectual circle that Henry Adams occupied.

As grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great grandson of President John Adams, Henry Adams might well have become a politician or diplomat. Indeed, as a young man, he had served as secretary to his father, who was the ambassador to the United Kingdom during the time of the bitterly contested Crimean War. Instead, Adams chose a career as a political journalist and historian. 

Both Hay and Adams were known for their sparkling dinner parties featuring the most interesting thinkers of their time, and so together they created a genial literary salon that focused on ideas and became the heart of literary Washington. Sixty years later in 1927, after both Hay and Adams had died, their houses were razed and a grand residential hotel was built in their place.

That was the history that Kay Enokido now wanted to revive. And so it was that The Hay-Adams Author Series was born. As books editor of the Washington Post, I would be responsible for coming up with fiction and nonfiction authors and securing their participation; The Hay-Adams, would be responsible for putting on a grand show. 

We started with the stars: David McCullough, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Jon Meacham, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Isaacson, and so on. Book lovers flocked to the occasions; and the stars never stopped coming. It was not only the deeply engaging literary conversations that drew them, it was the clever menu—always tailored to fit the theme of the book in question—and the spectacular vista, overlooking the White House with a bird’s eye view of the entire capital in a magisterial tableau.

The twenty years that have passed have seen a distinguished cavalcade of American writers parade before us. Today, Hay-Adams Managing Director, Nicolas Beliard, presides over the ever-new pleasures of the series. I have often thought how happily Henry Adams and John Hay would have enjoyed the delights their beloved salons have inspired. Happy Anniversary to a splendid tradition!