Ten Nights in a Bar Room

The Sickle and Sheaf opens in a quiet town, and the narrator returns each year for ten years to see what it has done: a miller ruined, a child killed by a thrown glass, a father in the gutter. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century; after Uncle Tom's Cabin this was the bestselling novel of its era, and it helped carry Prohibition. Forty-eight plates by painters including George Caleb Bingham and Eastman Johnson follow the tavern's course through the wider American scene of fields, gardens, elections, and mountains.