fiction

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women, but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist.

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.

How Ralph Ellison got Invisible Man into the canon.

The rise of popular literature for children put a story, a role model, and a set of values in a young boy’s pocket.

It has taken decades for an appreciation of Stein’s crime fiction to really take hold.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.

"If you read enough sources, you run into cases of slaves spending a lot of time over Christmas crying."

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?

The writer’s signature style of ending—a final, thrilling note—has the touch of magic that distinguishes the form at its best.