Cultural life
Washington is a city that offers a never-ending wealth of cultural opportunities. Scores of museums, galleries, and theatres are located in the city, many of which are internationally recognized. More money is spent per capita by the local government on the performing arts in D.C. than anywhere else in the United States. Cultural heritage festivals are held throughout the year. More than 750 libraries are located in the Washington area, including the Library of Congress, which contains the largest international collection of research materials in the world.
The arts
Literature
At the centre of Washington’s literary history are books written about national issues, the conduct of politics and government, and Washington society that have been written both by authors with D.C. roots and by authors whose tenure in the capital has been more limited. Initially published anonymously, Democracy (1886) is considered by some to be the quintessential Washington novel; its author, Henry Adams, lived for many years in Lafayette Square. Margaret Leech won a Pulitzer Prize for her Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (1941), about life in Washington during the Civil War. Other well-known novels set in the capital are D.C. native Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C. (1967), Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), and Primary Colors (1996), originally published anonymously but later attributed to political writer Joe Klein. Another Washington native, George Pelecanos, has used the city as the backdrop for his crime novels, and William Peter Blatty, who studied in Washington, used Georgetown as the setting for The Exorcist (1971). Nonfiction books about Washington include David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War (1988) and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men (1974).
Music
Washington’s contributions to the world of music have been significant, beginning with the compositions of bandleader John Philip Sousa, who grew up in Washington and led the U.S. Marine Band (1880–92). As noted earlier, Duke Ellington first made his mark musically in his native Washington. The city’s contributions to jazz history go beyond those of Ellington and the jazz-club scene that thrived on U Street to include singer and pianist Shirley Horn, pianists Billy Taylor and Chicago-born Ramsey Lewis, saxophonist Frank Weiss, singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Moreover, rhythm and blues singer Ruth Brown, originally from Virginia, was performing in a D.C. club when she was signed by Atlantic Records (known as “The House That Ruth Built”). Similarly, singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris was discovered in a Washington club, as was Roberta Flack; Harris, like Washingtonian Marvin Gaye, relocated before attaining fame.
More grounded in the milieu of Washington itself was go-go, a style of funk that originated in the city in the late 1970s. Pioneered by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers and heavy on bass and percussion, go-go by the early 1980s had become the most popular music of D.C. dance halls (called go-gos). Washington also played a vital role in the development of hardcore (locally rendered as “harDCore”) punk in the 1980s and ’90s, most notably through the contributions of Ian McKaye, first as a member of Minor Threat and later as the driving force behind both the band Fugazi and Dishcord Records. Still another D.C. native who began his career in Washington but established himself elsewhere was Henry Rollins, vocalist for the seminal hardcore punk band Black Flag and a performance poet.