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CIA Director George Bush and President Gerald R. Ford during a Meeting in the Cabinet Room

The Art of Administration: On Greg Barnhisel’s “Cold War Modernists”

Cold War modernists of the title do not seem to be the painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists who produced the original works.
by Donal Harris via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 2, 2016
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.
by Marilynne Robinson via New York Review of Books on January 5, 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
Portrait of Ambrose Bierce with skull

One of America's Best

Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.
by Michael Dirda via New York Review of Books on May 10, 2012
Harriet Beecher Stowe imagining her characters.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Art of Persuasion

Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.
by Annette Gordon-Reed via The New Yorker on June 6, 2011
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
Chart describing links between writers, painters, muses, and more in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Friends, Lovers, and Family

The interconnected circles of writers, painters, muses, and more.
via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 1, 2010
A cream colored map depicting the Middle Passage and trade routes between North America, South America, Africa, and Europe.

What Was Africa to Them?

How historians have understood Africa and the Black diaspora in global conversations about race and identity.
by Kwame Anthony Appiah via New York Review of Books on September 27, 2007
Photograph of Jack Kerouac looking into a shop window, by Allen Ginsberg.

Drive, Jack Kerouac Wrote

"On the Road" is a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on September 24, 2007
Green light in a dark sky.

On My Grandfather’s Novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" at 100

Reflections on the literary legacy of a timeless American novel.
by Eleanor Lanahan via Literary Hub on April 7, 2025
“Jeffries Knock-Out,” photograph of the Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries during the World Heavyweight Championship of 1910..

Jack London, Jack Johnson, and the Fight of the Century

In the 1910 World Heavyweight Championship, London cheered on Jim Jeffries as he faced off with Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion.
by Andrew Rihn via The Public Domain Review on March 26, 2025
A portrait of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Most Overrated Writer in America

Do people really like Edgar Allen Poe?
by Naomi Kanakia via Woman of Letters on March 18, 2025
Floyd’s rowboat used for gathering passengers offshore at Jaffa. Barque et Bateliers de Jaffa.

An American Dragoman in Palestine—and in Print

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and the Holy Land.
by Walker Robins via Commonplace on March 5, 2025
Robert Frost.

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines.
by Jay Parini via The American Scholar on March 3, 2025
Man holding The New Yorker magazine like a telescope.

Onward and Upward

Harold Ross founded The New Yorker as a comic weekly. A hundred years later, we’re doubling down on our commitment to the much richer publication it became.
by David Remnick via The New Yorker on February 10, 2025
Chinese workers standing in the streets.

The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.
by Jane C. Hu via The New Yorker on January 23, 2025

Infectious Diseases Killed Victorian Children at Alarming Rates. Novels Show the Fragility of Health

Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Authors documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.
by Andrea Kaston Tange via The Conversation on December 11, 2024
Sketch of Mother and Infant, by J. Alden Weir, 1888.
partner

Keep Her Body from Pain and Her Mind from Worry

A reading list tracing the history of the birth control movement through novels.
by Stephanie Gorton via HNN on November 19, 2024
Photo by Ralph Ellison of men standing by a street in New York City.

Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist's aestheticizing impulse contrasts with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.
by Jed Perl via New York Review of Books on October 17, 2024
Autumn, an 1856 sunset landscape painting by Frederic Church.

The Sound of the Picturesque

Charles Ives and the visual.
by Tim Barringer via The American Scholar on September 13, 2024
The title card for Little House of a Prairie on a green hill.

50 Years Ago: America Loved a Little House

The beloved family show left a lasting legacy.
by Troy Brownfield via The Saturday Evening Post on September 11, 2024
The original cover sketch of "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," by Richard Scarry, with cartoon animals in vehicles.

On Richard Scarry and the Art of Children's Literature

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.
by Chris Ware via The Yale Review on September 9, 2024
Audre Lorde

A Book That Puts the Life Back Into Biography

To capture the spirit of the poet Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs decided to break all the rules.
by Danielle Amir Jackson via The Atlantic on September 8, 2024
Tourists on a ferry sailing along the coast of Maine.

A Picture-Book Guide to Maine

Children’s stories set on the coast suggest a wilder way of life.
by Anna E. Holmes via The New Yorker on September 8, 2024
James Baldwin

Racism, Jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues”

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.
by Tom Jencks via OUPblog on August 2, 2024
Norman Mailer.

The Tough Guy Crew

Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals.
by Leonard Benardo via New Statesman on June 12, 2024
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
by Salamishah Tillet via The Atlantic on May 8, 2024
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glad to the Brink of Fear

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.
by Nicole Penn via American Purpose on March 13, 2024
Chickens.

Our Pets, Our Plates

In defense of the furred and the hoofed.
by Anne Matthews via The American Scholar on March 10, 2024
A photograph of George Washington Cable with Mark Twain.

The Dying Pelican

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.
by Eleanor Stern via 64 Parishes on February 29, 2024
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