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Basketball players resting on court

Game Changer

On the mismatched sporting advice of Clair Bee and John R. Tunis.
by Dan McQuade via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 10, 2023
Layered collage of an eye over the portrait of Thomas Jefferson, against the backdrop of the Declaration of Independence.

Who Really Wrote ‘the Pursuit of Happiness’?

The voice of Doctor Johnson, archcritic of the American Revolution, was constantly in mind for the Declaration of Independence’s drafter.
by Peter Moore via The Atlantic on July 4, 2023
The sillhouette of a Civil War statue on a night sky.

The Spirit of Appomattox

Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?
by Jonathan Clarke via The Hedgehog Review on March 1, 2023
Black writers Askia Toure, Lorenzo Thomas, and Ismael Reed seated at an Umbra meeting.

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement? Ishmael Reed reflects on the transformation and growth of Black arts since the 1960s.
by Ishmael Reed via New York Review of Books on January 14, 2023
Books from the 1990s.

What Literature Do We Study From the 1990s?

The turn-of-the-century literary canon, using data from college syllabi.
by Matthew Daniels via The Pudding on January 11, 2023
Woman standing on a wall of books, holding a megaphone, 1919.

Choice Reading

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.
by Denise Gigante via Lapham’s Quarterly on November 21, 2022
Edith Wharton.

Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton’s Present Tense

"The Custom of the Country" and its unique relationship with ideas of feminism and the culture of the early 20th century elite.
by Sarah Blackwood via The Paris Review on November 1, 2022
Library of Ashurbanipal Mesopotamia 1500-539 BC Gallery, British Museum, London

Stop Weaponizing History

Right and left are united in a vulgar form of historicism.
by Arjun Appadurai via The Chronicle of Higher Education on September 27, 2022
A family tree relating Aaron Sachs' book "Up From the Depths" with Lewis Mumford and Herman Melville.

Why Reading History for Its “Lessons” Misses the Point

On Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, and the gentle art of looking back in time.
by Daniel Immerwahr via Slate on June 6, 2022
Painting of an ocean by the British painter J. M. W. Turner, 1840-1845. Pictured is a stormy sea, its waves breaking on a shore.

The Sea According to Rachel Carson

Her first three books were odes to the world’s bodies of water and their creative power over all life forms.
by Hannah Gold via The Nation on May 17, 2022
Photo of Jack Kerouac, 1956

Jack Kerouac’s Journey

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.
by Joyce Johnson via New York Review of Books on March 2, 2022
Illustration of Silvia Federici in a picket line, by Jovana Mugosa.

Silvia Federici Sees Your Unpaid Work

The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a boiling point.
by Joanna Biggs via The New Republic on February 11, 2022
Painting of a Puritan family sitting around a table with books.

Read More Puritan Poetry

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.
by Ed Simon via The Millions on February 4, 2022
William Faulkner in front of bookshelf

William Faulkner’s Tragic Vision

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.
by Jonathan Clarke via City Journal on January 4, 2022
Illustration of Louise Fitzhugh smiling and holding journal.

The Tragic Misfit Behind “Harriet the Spy”

The girl sleuth, now the star of a TV show, has been eased into the canon. In the process, she’s shed the politics that motivated her creation.
by Rebecca Panovka via The New Yorker on December 9, 2021
Newspaper article titled 'Novel-reading a cause of female depravity'

Why Novels Will Destroy Your Mind

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.
by Clive Thompson via Medium on September 9, 2021
A church building situated amongst mountains.

Thoreau In Good Faith

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.
by Caleb Smith via Public Books on July 19, 2021
John Cage on the quiz show "Lascia o Raddoppia?"

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.
by Fintan O’Toole via New York Review of Books on July 1, 2021
Abstract composition by Valentijn Edgar Van Uytvanck, 1918

Still Farther South: Poe and Pym’s Suggestive Symmetries

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward.
by John Tresch via The Public Domain Review on June 16, 2021
Lady with black hair tied up in a bun

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on June 12, 2021
Photograph of Mabel Loomis Todd with a child

Bitchy Little Spinster

Emily Dickinson and the woman in her orbit.
by Joanne O'Leary via London Review of Books on June 3, 2021

What We Want from Richard Wright

A newly restored novel tests an old dynamic between readers and the author of “Native Son.”
by Lauren Michele Jackson via The New Yorker on May 12, 2021
A collage of significant people from the time like the Beatles and Elvis.

How Americans Re-Learned to Think After World War II

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.
by Carlos Lozada via Washington Post on April 16, 2021
Black and white photo of poet John Berryman having a beer and a conversation with a group of men

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman's Dream Songs made explicit the racialization of American poetry's turn—and the whiteness of lyric tradition.
by Kamran Javadizadeh via New York Review of Books on April 8, 2021
Joe Biden surrounded by words emanating from a book.

Can America’s Problems Be Fixed By A President Who Loves Jon Meacham?

How a pop historian shaped the soul of Biden’s presidency.
by Kara Voght via Mother Jones on April 2, 2021
Vincent Price.

The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
by Phil Christman via The Hedgehog Review on March 25, 2021
Headshot of William Faulkner

‘A Land Where the Dead Past Walks’

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on December 20, 2020
partner

Quoting Irish Poetry, Joe Biden is Making Hope and History Rhyme

Explaining Joe Biden’s fondness for quoting Irish poets.
by Cóilín Parsons via Made By History on November 1, 2020
An image of William Faulkner and author André Malroux.

Faulkner Couldn’t Overcome Racism, But He Never Ignored It

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.
by Chandra Manning via Washington Post on October 2, 2020
Buildings in the forest.

Faulkner as Futurist

For Faulkner, all of time existed as a moment, during which all could be changed: past, present, and future.
by Carl Rollyson via The Hedgehog Review on September 1, 2020
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