The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful, entertaining, and
surprisingly true story of how in the summer of 1835 a
series of articles in the Sun, the first of the city’s
“penny papers,” convinced the citizens of New York that the
moon was inhabited. Six articles, purporting to reveal the
lunar discoveries made by a world-famous British astronomer,
described the life found on the moon—including unicorns,
beavers that walked upright, and, strangest of all,
four-foot-tall flying man-bats. The series quickly became
the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era. And
the Sun, a brash working-class upstart less than two years
old, had become the most widely read newspaper in the world.
Told in richly novelistic detail, The Sun and the Moon
brings the raucous world of 1830s New York City vividly to
life—the noise, the excitement, the sense that almost
anything was possible. The book overflows with
larger-than-life characters, including Richard Adams Locke,
author of the moon series (who never intended it to be a
hoax at all); a fledgling showman named P.T. Barnum, who had
just brought his own hoax to New York; and the young writer
Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that the moon series was
a plagiarism of his own work. An exhilarating narrative
history of a city on the cusp of greatness and a nation
newly united by affordable newspapers, The Sun and the Moon
may just be the strangest true story you’ve ever read.
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