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“I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself.” – page 207

Welcome

The New Student Reading Project at Cornell University is celebrating its 11th anniversary this year with E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and Langley.

Homer and Langley provides a fictionalized redaction of the lives of the renowned Collyer brothers, whose story became a New York urban legend. After their parents’ death in the flu pandemic of 1918, within the family mansion on Fifth Avenue Homer and Langley compile a world of their own, apart from but intimately and paradoxically connected with the transformative events of twentieth-century American history.

This website is your portal to Homer and Langley, as well as all the activities and details of the events surrounding our reading of this important novel. Please use this site to explore some of the activities going on throughout Cornell and surrounding communities.

Win $200 worth of books!  Select one of the study questions and write a one page response.  Submit your response at the small group discussion on August 22nd and you’ll be entered to win $200 worth of books at the Cornell Campus Store. One prize will be awarded for each of the ten study questions.