New Exhibition Explores 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling

The Morgan Library & Museum's Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling will explore the history of storytelling running January 30 through May 3, 2026.

It highlights a variety of narratives from the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis which is among the earliest literary works preserved in written to works by writers inspired by New York City, featuring printed books, manuscripts, comics, photographs, drawings, paintings, films, and artifacts.

Come Together will be divided into five sections:

• 'Belief and Belonging' will consider origin stories, epics, legends, and myths, giving primacy to the Indigenous storytellers of North America
• 'Shaping Stories' sheds light on the roles of editors, publishers, illustrators, and translators to the development of literary works
  and are often less visible than the authors, featuring a heavily annotated page of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean de Brunhoff’s earliest drawings of Babar, and a woodcut-illustrated edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales printed around 1483 by William Caxton
• 'Picture This' showcases diverse approaches to visual storytelling including devices such as the speech bubble and a leaf from an English medieval manuscript which uses sequences of pictures to signal movement through time
• 'Life Stories' includes texts and artworks centred on personal experience such as Henry David Thoreau’s journals and Édouard Manet’s only surviving notebook
• 'New York Stories' reflects the multicultural metropolis as seen through the lens of visitors, immigrants, and native New Yorkers, among them Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of programs, including; a lecture on storytelling through poetry with Pádraig Ó Tuama on February 19; an online short course on the importance of narrative with Morgan curators in February; and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain with Rhonda Evans on April 9.