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Painting of people examining a globe that depicts California as an island.

California, an Island?

Meet cartography's most persistent mistake.
Book cover of Upton Sinclair's book, featuring text and his profile

Mankind, Unite!

How Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for governor of California inspired a cult.

A Book of Necessary, Speculative Narratives for the Anonymous Black Women of History

Unearthing the beauty in the wayward, the fiction in the facts, and the thriving existence in the face of a blanked out history.

It's Time to Stop Talking About a 'National Divorce'

The right's eagerness for a "peaceful separation" of the nation echoes pieces of race war fiction.
Book cover of the novel Trinity, depicting a man in a business suit casting a long shadow.

On Oppenheimer

A conversation with Louisa Hall about her novel, “Trinity.”

Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship

What happens when we find out writers aren't who they said they were.
Film still of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

The Contested Legacy of Atticus Finch

Lee’s beloved father figure was a talking point during the Kavanaugh hearings and is now coming to Broadway. Is he still a hero?

What War of the Worlds Did

The uncanny realism of Orson Welles’s radio play crystallised a fear of communication technology that haunts us today.

How Horror Changed After WWI

The war created a new world, an alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914 expected their lives to be.

History for a Post-Fact America

A review of Jill Lepore's new book, which she has called the most ambitious single-volume American history written in generations.
Film still of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

How Reconsidering Atticus Finch Makes Us Reconsider America

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.

This 60-Year-Old Novel About Sexual Harassment Was Ahead Of Its Time

"The Best of Everything" outlined the dynamics and the costs of sexual harassment, decades before anyone talked openly about it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder

Librarians without Chests: A Response to the ALSC’s Denigration of Laura Ingalls Wilder

A network of professional librarians seeks to destroy a beloved literary heroine and malign her creator.

New York City, the Perfect Setting for a Fictional Cold War Strike

On Collier’s 1950 cover story, “Hiroshima, USA: Can Anything Be Done About It?”

We’re the Good Guys, Right?

Marvel's heroes are back again, but with little of the subversive aura that once surrounded them.

Coming in from the Cold

On spy fiction.
Willa Cather

Willa Cather, Pioneer

Willa Cather's life and work broke with the standards of her time.

Was the Real Lone Ranger a Black Man?

The amazing true story of Bass Reeves, the formerly enslaved man who patrolled the Wild West.
original

At Home With Ursula Le Guin

Her novels featured dragons and wizards, but they were also deeply grounded in indigenous American ways of thought.

The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.

Arthur Mervin, Bankrupt

An 18th-century novel explores how American society handles capitalism's collateral damage — and who deserves a second chance.
Illustrated sperm whale with blue stripes of water.

The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick

There was little indication 166 years ago that the book would enter the canon of great American fiction.

Brian Tochterman on the 'Summer of Hell'

What E.B. White, Mickey Spillane, Death Wish, hip-hop, and the “Summer of Hell” have in common.

Little Government in the Big Woods

Melissa Gilbert's lost bid for Congress and the forgotten political history of 'Little House on the Prairie.'
Aerial view of identical-looking houses in suburbs

Welcome to Disturbia

Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
Rows of typewriters in front of computers

How Literature Became Word Perfect

Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
An illustration of Weyer’s Cave from 1858.

The 19th Century ‘Show Caves’ That Became America’s First Tourist Traps

Novelists concocted elaborate fake histories for mysterious caves in Virginia.
Edgar Allan Poe

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.
Typewriter with keys that have the letters "IA" on each of them.

How Iowa Flattened Literature

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.
Gen. Lew Wallace, circa 1861.

The Incredible Life of Lew Wallace, Civil War General and Author of Ben-Hur

The incredible story of how a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

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