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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

Remembering Philip Roth

Philip Roth's work could only have been written by someone who came of age during the peak of postwar liberalism.
by Laura Tanenbaum via Jacobin on May 26, 2018

Yes, ‘Little House on the Prairie’ is Racially Insensitive — But We Should Still Read It

Librarians are once again raising concerns over the book’s depiction of Native Americans.
by Caroline Fraser via Washington Post on May 13, 2018

Coming in from the Cold

On spy fiction.
by Nicholas Dames via n+1 on April 13, 2018

Fine Specimens

How Walt Whitman became the quintessential poet of disability and death.
by David S. Reynolds via New York Review of Books on March 11, 2018

The Notorious Book that Ties the Right to the Far Right

The enduring popularity of "The Camp of the Saints" sheds light on nativists' historical opposition to immigration.
by Sarah Jones via The New Republic on February 2, 2018

The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty

Why so many of the people who quote Emma Lazarus’s Petrarchan sonnet miss its true meaning.
by Walt Hunter via The Atlantic on January 16, 2018

The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.
by Gary Scharnhorst via The Paris Review on January 9, 2018

Borne Back Into the Past

Mike St. Thomas reviews ‘Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald.'
by Mike St. Thomas via Commonweal on January 4, 2018
Portrait of Charles Dickens from his 1842 trip to America.

Charles Dickens Had Serious Beef with America and Its Bad Manners

How Charles Dickens' unpleasant trip to Boston led to "A Christmas Carol."
by Samantha Silva via Literary Hub on December 21, 2017
Caroline and Charles Ingalls

Little House, Small Government

How Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier vision of freedom and survival lives on in Trump’s America.
by Vivian Gornick via The New Republic on November 16, 2017

Zora Neale Hurston: “A Genius of the South”

John W. W. Zeiser reviews Peter Bagge's graphic biography "Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story."
by John W. W. Zeiser via Los Angeles Review of Books on November 13, 2017
Lin Manuel Miranda and fellow actor dressed in colonial era clothing

How to Love Problematic Pop Culture

Revisiting the contradictions in "Hamilton" – and in the pushback to criticisms of the beloved musical.
by Lyra Monteiro via Medium on August 27, 2017

The True American

A review on the many publications about Henry David Thoreau's life for the bicentennial anniversary of his birthday.
by Robert Pogue Harrison via New York Review of Books on August 17, 2017

What Happens When Children's Books Fail to Confront the Complexity of Slavery

We need literature that wrestles with the evils of slavery while confronting its complexity – especially when it’s written for children
by Michael W. Twitty via The Guardian on January 19, 2016

Bad Air in William Delisle Hay’s 'The Doom of the Great City' (1880)

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory in what is considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.
by Brett Beasley via The Public Domain Review on September 30, 2015
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.
by Eric Bennett via The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 10, 2014
Illustrated cover of the "Secret Garden"

100 Years of The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's biographer considers her life and how personal tragedy underpinned the creation of her most famous work.
by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina via The Public Domain Review on March 8, 2011

Phillis Wheatley: an Eighteenth-Century Genius in Bondage

Vincent Carretta takes a look at the remarkable life of the first ever African-American woman to be published.
by Vincent Carretta via The Public Domain Review on December 2, 2006
James Baldwin

The Making and Unmaking of James Baldwin

On the private and public lives of the author of “The Fire Next Time” and “Giovanni’s Room.”
by Hilton Als via The New Yorker on February 9, 1998
Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974.

America the Beautiful

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.
by John Pistelli via The Metropolitan Review on April 7, 2025
Robert Frost.

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines.
by Jay Parini via The American Scholar on March 3, 2025
1800s lithograph by George du Maurier showing a chair dance in an art studio.

Done in by Time

A review of Edwin Frank's short list of great 20th century novels.
by Joseph Epstein via Lamp Magazine on February 14, 2025
Zora Neale Hurston.

Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on January 13, 2025
Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: The Original Substacker

Publishing needs his democratic spirit.
by Sam Kahn via UnHerd on December 13, 2024
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