The Sun and the Moon:

On Wednesday, August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the Sun brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles purported to reveal the existence of life on the moon — including unicorns, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and, strangest of all, four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks the series 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, the author of the moon series; 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 divided city on the cusp of greatness and a crew of writers, editors, and charlatans who stumbled onto a new kind of journalism, The Sun and the Moon tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made American into a nation of newspaper readers.