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“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

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
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