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The Great American Novels

136 books that made America think.
via The Atlantic on March 14, 2024
Girls reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Betty Smith Enchanted a Generation of Readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.
by Rachel Gordan via The Conversation on February 27, 2024
A hand-drawn, slightly abstract image of a pink typewriter, using a QWERTY keyboard.

Page Against the Machine

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.
by Mitch Therieau via Bookforum on February 6, 2024
Jewish moneylender choking debtor

"A Fiendish Fascination"

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.
by David S. Reynolds via New York Review of Books on February 1, 2024
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
A pink, fluffy cloud raining colorful cubes, reminiscent of pieces of data.

What Do We Owe? Generosity, Attribution, and the Perilous Invisibility of Research Infrastructure

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.
by Karin Wulf via The Scholarly Kitchen on January 18, 2024
Bud Schulberg testifying before HUAC.

During the 2023 Writers Strike, This Book Helped Me Understand the Depravities of Hollywood

A 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.
by Alex N. Press via Jacobin on December 8, 2023
Painting by Pablo Ventura called "War Souvenirs #9" depicting a soldier kissing a woman, another with a bicycle, and World War II propaganda posters.

Writing Under Fire

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.
by Nathaniel Rich via New York Review of Books on November 30, 2023
Illustration of multiple people drawing the same cover of a book

Big Publishing Killed the Author

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on November 15, 2023
A photograph of Louisa May Alcott.

Nonfiction That Rivals Little Women: The Forgotten Essays of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women, but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist.
by Liz Rosenberg via Literary Hub on October 24, 2023
Captain Lightfood on horseback firing a pistol.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: The American Creation of Irish Outlaw Folk Heroes

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 
by Jerry Kuntz via Commonplace on August 8, 2023
Tennessee Williams

How Thomas Lanier Williams Became Tennessee

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.
by Casey N. Cep via The New Yorker on July 3, 2023
Illustrated portrait of Don DeLillo against a firey background.

Secret Histories

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.
by Siddhartha Deb via The Nation on June 26, 2023
Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.
by Greg Grandin via The Nation on June 21, 2023
The cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923, featuring a hooded Klan member.

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
by Matthew Wills via JSTOR Daily on May 24, 2023
Daguerreotype of a young woman, with her head resting on her hand.

In Love with a Daguerreotype

A nineteenth-century twist on love at first sight.
by Julia Case-Levine via Lapham’s Quarterly on May 15, 2023
original

Pieces of the Past

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.
by Ed Ayers on March 15, 2023
Diagram with three mollusks

Edgar Allan Poe: Pioneering Mollusk Scientist

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.
by James D. Lilley via Commonplace on November 1, 2022
Black and white photo of Lydia Maria Child reading a book

Living in Words

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on October 13, 2022
Illustration of fantasy elements including a maze and a crystal ball from a "choose-your-own-adventure" scene from a book.

The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.
by Leslie Jamison via The New Yorker on September 12, 2022
Invisible Man book cover with Ralph Ellison on the back

Broke and Blowing Deadlines

How Ralph Ellison got Invisible Man into the canon.
by Anne Trubek via Notes From A Small Press on June 29, 2022
Drawing of a group of young boys around a table, entitled "Mischievous Matt," from a story paper.

Dime Novels and Story Papers for Kids

The rise of popular literature for children put a story, a role model, and a set of values in a young boy’s pocket.
by Michael Denning, Betsy Golden Kellem, Sara Lindey, Margaret Cassidy via JSTOR Daily on June 23, 2022
Black and white photo of Gertrude Stein writing at desk.

Gertrude Stein's Pulp Fiction

It has taken decades for an appreciation of Stein’s crime fiction to really take hold.
by Gertrude Stein, Cornelius Fortune, Mark McGurl, Brooks Landon via JSTOR Daily on June 22, 2022
A picture of an eerie dark house.

This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.
by Adam Fales via Dilettante Army on February 15, 2022
Illustration of two ghostly women

The Haunted World of Edith Wharton

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.
by Krithika Varagur via The Nation on February 8, 2022
Magazine illustration depicting fantastical inventions for travel on water, land, and air, titled March of Intellect, by William Heath, c. 1828.

A Utopia of Useful Things

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.
by Michael Rawson via Lapham’s Quarterly on December 24, 2021
Plantation house in the snow.

The Grim History of Christmas for Slaves in the Deep South

"If you read enough sources, you run into cases of slaves spending a lot of time over Christmas crying."
by Olivia B. Waxman, Robert L. May via TIME on December 21, 2021
Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, and snowman.

How Mrs. Claus Embodied 19th-Century Debates About Women's Rights

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.
by Maura Ives via The Conversation on December 15, 2021

The Once and Future Temp

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
by Eve Zelickson via Public Books on August 27, 2021
The writer (seen here in a picture from the eighteen-eighties) hid his own life story.

Are All Short Stories O. Henry Stories?

The writer’s signature style of ending—a final, thrilling note—has the touch of magic that distinguishes the form at its best.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on June 28, 2021
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