literature

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.

136 books that made America think.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Literature is key to a healthy democracy, but schools are leaving books behind.

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?

19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt’s subversive literature.

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.

Reading the literature of past plagues and suddenly seeing our present reflected in a mirror.

How James Baldwin confronted America's most exceptional lie.

The literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in the exact realms where art excels.

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.

‘Cold Warriors’ traces how the U.S. and Soviet government used writers like George Orwell and Boris Pasternak to wage ideological battles during the Cold War.

He would point out that what plagues us are America's sins coming home to roost.

Without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

On the life and times of Jason Epstein, cofounder of “The New York Review of Books.”

On self-pleasure and sex education in children's literature.