This corpus represents the efforts of the Chicago Text Lab to build a significant collection of contemporary American fiction spanning the period 1880-2000. The corpus contains nearly 9,000 novels which were selected based on the number of library holdings as recorded in WorldCat. They represent a diverse array of authors and genres, including both highly canonical and mass-market works. There are about 7,000 authors represented in the corpus, with peak holdings around 1900 and the 1980s.