WPR

Chapter A Day

Started in 1931, “Chapter a Day” is WPR’s longest-running program. Jim Fleming, Norman Gilliland, Michele Good, Melvin Hinton, Baron Kelly and Susan Sweeney read a chapter from a book for a half hour each weekday. Genres are predominately contemporary and range from works of fiction, history and biography.

Schedule

WPR Music, 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., WPR News, 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

A man in a hat walks on the Brooklyn Bridge; the book cover reads Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss.
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CURRENTLY READING


Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss

Monday, May 26 through Friday, June 20, 2025

Read by Melvin Hinton


Clarence King was a late 19th-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life – the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. Noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.

LISTENER ADVISORY: This book contains language which listeners may find offensive.

THEME: “From the Black Belt” by William Grant Still performed by the Westchester Symphony Orchestra, Siegried Landau conductor

(Penguin Books; ISBN 10: 014311686X / ISBN 13 978-0143116868)


Readings are archived for one week following the broadcast day of the last chapter due to publisher 
copyright restrictions.


Latest Episodes

Chapter A Day Booklist

View information about every book we’ve read in the past 30 years!

Coming Next

A person stands alone, viewing a large framed painting in a grand gallery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book cover reads: All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley.
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All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bringley

monday, june 23 through friday, july 04, 2025
Read by pete bissen


Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d become a guard at an art museum. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew — The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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NPR Book Concierge