The Center for Fiction, founded in 1820 as the Mercantile Library, is the only organization in the United States devoted solely to the vital art of fiction. The mission of The Center for Fiction is to encourage people to read and value fiction and to support and celebrate its creation and enjoyment. With all our resources, including our exceptional book collection, our beautiful reading room, our expanding website, and our ever-growing array of creative programs, we seek to serve the reading public, to build a larger audience for fiction, and to create a place where readers and writers can share their passion for literature.

The Center for Fiction was founded by merchants and their clerks before the advent of public libraries. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was thriving as one of the foremost cultural institutions in the United States, with an extraordinary collection of books in the humanities, and a popular lecture program that featured such renowned speakers as William Makepeace Thackeray, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain. The Center offered classes on many subjects and was considered a meeting place for social and educational pursuits.

The Center currently focuses on collecting and lending fiction, both literary and popular, presenting literary programs for the general public, and renting low-cost space to writers and other literary organizations. It has developed one of the best collections of fiction in the United States and had benefited from six National Endowment for the Humanities grants for literary programming in the past ten years.