For some it began with Go Dog Go, Busy, Busy Town or Green Eggs and Ham. The tears may have started with the dogs, Old Yeller, Sounder and Where the Red Fern Grows.

February 2013 marked the centenary of the birthof Rosa Parks, the African American seamstress from Montgomery, Ala., who became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement” after her courageous refusal to give up her seat on a public bus. The image of a tidy, genteel, quiet lady with her head held high remains emblazoned as a totemic image of the movement.

Excerpted from a letter to William Blackburn written July 23, 1949 from Valley Cottage, N.Y. Mr. Blackburn was a professor at Duke and an early mentor of William Styron’s.

Sean Wilentz is hardly your Quaaludes and vitriol music critic. That may be why the Bob Dylan in America author was commissioned to write the definitive history of one of America’s truly great record companies. Mr. Wilentz is also the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.

Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard is a Russo family tradition. “I’m trying to remember the first time we took my daughters to the Vineyard, but I know they’ve been coming every year since they were 10 or 11, maybe even earlier,” said novelist Richard Russo, who in 2002 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book Empire Falls.

Maggie Shipstead was not yet 30 when she finished her first novel, Seating Arrangements. The story, as she described it in a recent interview, is about “an ever-so-slightly dysfunctional Waspy family holding a shotgun wedding on a resort island.”

Ms. Shipstead has never been to the Vineyard before. It is of Nantucket that she speaks, naturally.

The town of Oak Bluffs closed two Lagoon Pond beaches Wednesday morning to swimming. Samples of saltwater taken on Monday tested positive for high counts of a bacteria known as enterococci, a bacteria that can indicate the presence of fecal contamination.

The town closed Medeiros Cove off the Sailing Camp Park and the drawbridge beach at Eastville. A harborside Eastville beach remains open.

Schedule of Panels - Edgartown Room

11:00 a.m.  History: Past and Present with Jill Lepore (Mansion of Happiness), Tony Horwitz (Midnight Rising), and Tom Reiss (The Black Count). Moderator Patricia Sullivan

11:50 a.m.  Gangsters, Guns and Sociopaths with Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy (Whitey Bulger), and Dick Lehr (Whitey). Moderator John Kennedy

Best-selling author Adam Mansbach claims that he’s “really bad” at not working. He has spent a lifetime of summers at his family’s longtime home in Chilmark, times full of idyllic pleasures — bodysurfing, grilling fish from Larsen’s, living in a house overlooking a beach — that anyone would find enviable. But Mr. Mansbach cites his time on the Vineyard as his most productive as a writer.

There is a large group of literature in the American canon referred to as “coming of age.” Though Susan Choi will discuss her new book, My Education, at a Saturday afternoon panel at the Harbor View Hotel entitled Coming of Age, she says it only partially belongs there.