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William Faulkner writes at a typewriter in front of a messy bookshelf, not looking at the camera.

What to Do About William Faulkner

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.
by Drew Gilpin Faust via The Atlantic on August 8, 2020
A printed advertisement for "The Bookman" depicting a fish reacting to "The Bookman" on a hook.

The Power of Flawed Lists

How "The Bookman" invented the best seller.
by Elizabeth Della Zazzera via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 27, 2020
Illustration taken from The Great Gatsby, The Graphic Novel

Greil Marcus Takes a Deep Dive Into "the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby"

An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’
by Allen Barra via The National Book Review on July 17, 2020

The Forever War Over War Literature

A post-9/11 veteran novelist explores a post-Vietnam literary soiree gone bad, and finds timeless lessons about a contentious and still-evolving genre.
by Matt Gallagher via The New Republic on July 17, 2020
Drawing of two angels flying above Longfellow

What Is There to Love About Longfellow?

He was the most revered poet of his day. It’s worth trying to figure out why.
by James Marcus via The New Yorker on June 1, 2020
A hospital filled with patients during the influenza pandemic of 1918

How Pandemics Seep into Literature

The literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in the exact realms where art excels.
by Elizabeth Outka via The Paris Review on April 8, 2020
Rebecca West.

Whittaker Chambers Through the Eyes of Rebecca West

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners.
by Peter Baehr via National Review on April 2, 2020
Photographs of Lilian Smith and Frank Yerby.

Frank Yerby and Lillian Smith: Challenging the Myths of Whiteness

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.
by Matthew Teutsch via The Bitter Southerner on January 9, 2020

The Asian-American Canon Breakers

Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on January 6, 2020

To Be Mary MacLane

In the early twentieth century, Mary MacLane’s genre-defying books earned the scorn of critics and the adoration of readers across the nation.
by Penelope Rosemont via The Paris Review on December 5, 2019

"Ulysses" on Trial

It was a setup: a stratagem worthy of wily Ulysses himself.
by Michael Chabon via New York Review of Books on September 13, 2019

The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick

For Herman Melville, the color white could be horrifyingly bleak.
by Gabrielle Bellot via Literary Hub on August 1, 2019

Herman Melville at Home

The novelist drew on far-flung voyages to create his masterpiece. But he could finish it only at his beloved Berkshire farm.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on July 22, 2019

A Universe of One’s Own

Only in the science fiction genre can one compare an alien to a woman.
by Nicole Rudick via New York Review of Books on July 8, 2019

Triumph and Disaster: The Tragic Hubris of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If—’

The long and complicated life of Kipling's famous poem.
by Christopher Benfey via New York Review of Books on July 3, 2019
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling in America

What happened to the great defender of Empire when he settled in the States?
by Charles McGrath via The New Yorker on July 1, 2019
Glowing white "No" against a red background.

“Perhaps We’re Being Dense.” Rejection Letters Sent to Famous Writers

Some kind, some weird, some unbelievably harsh.
by Emily Temple via Literary Hub on June 19, 2019

“1984” at Seventy

Why we still read Orwell’s book of prophecy.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on June 8, 2019
An elderly Walt Whitman with his nurse Warren Fritzinger.

Walt Whitman's Boys

To appreciate who Whitman was, we have to reinterpret the poet in ways that have made generations of critical gatekeepers uncomfortable.
by Jeremy Lybarger via Boston Review on May 30, 2019
Sunrise view with a marsh waterfront.

Why My Students Don’t Call Themselves ‘Southern’ Writers

On reckoning with a fraught literary history.
by Katy Simpson Smith via Literary Hub on March 13, 2019

Reading in an Age of Catastrophe

A review of George Hutchinson's "Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s."
by Edward Mendelson via New York Review of Books on February 25, 2019

Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship

What happens when we find out writers aren't who they said they were.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on December 10, 2018

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.
by W. Scott Poole via Literary Hub on October 31, 2018
James Baldwin.

James Baldwin’s Ideas and Activism during the 1980s

Baldwin's often overlooked final years of activism during the 1980's.
by Aderson François via Black Perspectives on September 20, 2018
The Writing Master, by Thomas Eakins, 1882. Painting of a man wearing glasses and writing with a pen.

Yawns Innumerable

The story of John Quincy Adams’ forgotten epic poem—and its most critical reader.
by Matthew Sherrill via Lapham’s Quarterly on September 6, 2018

The Old Man and His Muse: Hemingway’s Toe-Curling Infatuation with Adriana Ivancich

For the last decade of his life, the sozzled Hemingway was in thrall to an Italian 30 years his junior.
by Nicholas Shakespeare via The Spectator on September 1, 2018

My Fellow Prisoners

The grand lesson of John McCain's life should be that heroic politics is a broken politics.
by George Blaustein via n+1 on August 29, 2018

The Nuclear Fail

Physicist and writer Leo Szilard was vital to the creation of the atomic bomb. He also did everything he could to prevent its use.
by Emily Harnett via Hazlitt on July 30, 2018

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?”
by Sara Blair via Literary Hub on June 13, 2018

When Walt Whitman’s Poems Were Rejected for Being Too Timely

"1861" is just so 1861.
by Emily Temple via Literary Hub on May 31, 2018
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