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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
A house.

Poe in the City

Peeples helps us to see that Poe’s imagination was stoked by his external surroundings as well as by his interior life.
by Henry T. Edmondson III via Law & Liberty on December 11, 2020
A black and white artistic photo

A Quest to Discover America’s First Science-Fiction Writer

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it?
by Paul Collins via The New Yorker on November 28, 2020
A collage of book covers.

The Radical Origins of Self-Help Literature

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?
by Jennifer Wilson via The Nation on November 17, 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
A plaster cast of an early 1900s jack-o’-lantern, known as a “ghost turnip.”

The Twisted Transatlantic Tale of American Jack-o’-Lanterns

Celtic rituals, tricks of nature, and deals with the devil have all played a part in creating this iconic symbol of Halloween.
by Blane Bachelor via National Geographic on October 27, 2020
Photographic collage of James Baldwin

Bringing It Back to Baldwin

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
by Joel Rhone via The Drift on October 21, 2020
Two adults holding hands with a child in front of a Christmas tree

The Oracle of Our Unease

The enchanted terms in which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it.
by Sarah Churchwell via New York Review of Books on September 24, 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

Charles Averill’s The Cholera-Fiend: Fiction for a Pandemic

The 1850 novel reveals disturbing continuities between the 19th century cholera pandemics and global health crises today.
by Sari Alschuler, Paul Erickson via The Panorama on August 23, 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
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
19th caricature of a dentist extracting a tooth

Sicko Doctors: Suffering and Sadism in 19th-Century America

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found unnerving.
by Chelsea Davis via The Public Domain Review on July 1, 2020
A white hand holding white flowers.

100 Years of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence"

Where does Edith Wharton's idea of innocence fall into our own world?
by Rachel Vorona Cote via Jezebel on June 24, 2020
Flannery O'Connor standing outside at her Georgia home.

How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?

She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.
by Paul Elie via The New Yorker on June 15, 2020

Strategic Long-Term Propaganda

A new book considers the mid-century authors who were – and weren't – willing to have their work deployed in the service of the Cold War.
by Randy Boyagoda via First Things on June 1, 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

Pandemics Go Hand in Hand with Conspiracy Theories

From the Illuminati to “COVID-19 is a lie,” how pandemics have produced contagions of fear.
by Frederick Kaufman via The New Yorker on May 13, 2020
The Oakland Municipal Auditorium set up as a hospital, with Red Cross nurses tending to flu patients, 1918.

The 1918 Flu Pandemic Killed Millions. So Why Does Its Cultural Memory Feel So Faint?

A new book suggests that the plague’s horrors haunt modernist literature between the lines.
by Rebecca Onion, Elizabeth Outka via Slate on May 3, 2020
Portrait of John Brown beside the American flag, c.1846.

America, Lost and Found at Wounded Knee

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.
by Ed Simon, Frederick H. Jackson, Donald M. Foerster via JSTOR Daily on April 29, 2020

The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.
by Jessi Jezewska Stevens via The Nation on April 13, 2020
Sign noting that spitting spreads the Spanish flu.

Trapped on a Ship During a Pandemic

“Either they’ve got no conscience, or they’re not awake to the gravity of the situation.”
by Willa Cather via Lapham’s Quarterly on March 31, 2020

The Seminal Novel About the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Written by a Texan

Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ tells the tale of a pandemic she barely survived.
by Michael Agresta via Texas Monthly on March 25, 2020
The title page of Life and confession of Ann Walters, the female murderess.

How “Female Fiends” Challenged Victorian Ideals

At a time when questions about women's rights in marriage roiled society, women readers took to the pages of cheap books about husband-murdering wives.
by Dawn Keetley, Erin Blakemore via JSTOR Daily on March 25, 2020

What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About

In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on March 23, 2020
A photo of William Faulkner

The Road to Glory: Faulkner’s Hollywood Years, 1932–1936

Lisa C. Hickman reconstructs William Faulkner’s tumultuous Hollywood sojourn of 1932–1936.
by Lisa C. Hickman via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 27, 2020

Emily Dickinson Escapes

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.
by Lynne Feeley via Boston Review on February 20, 2020
Nicholas Black Elk

Wounded Knee and the Myth of the Vanished Indian

The story of the 1890 massacre was often about the end of Native American resistance to US expansion. But that’s not how everyone told it.
by Livia Gershon, Lisa Tatonetti via JSTOR Daily on February 17, 2020

Ride Shotgun through Mid-Century LA with Ed Ruscha’s Photos and Jack Kerouac’s Words

A kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.
by Matthew Miller via Aeon on January 7, 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
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