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Spooking the Censors

Spooking the Censors

In the 1950s, the CIA funded efforts to smuggle great works of literature into the Eastern Bloc.
Paper in a typewriter, with the words "the end" just typed.

Words Left Behind: The Quandary of Posthumous Publishing

Joan Didion’s journal entries posthumously has sparked a wider ethical debate: Is it acceptable to publish a writer’s unfinished work after their death?
The four Harper Brothers, founders of the namesake publishing giant.
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The 200 Year History of American Virtue Capitalism

Despite the recent backlash against DEI, there is a longstanding tradition of virtue capitalism in the United States.
Painting of the Bay of San Francisco, by Eduard Hildebrandt.

Mark Twain, the Californian

In 1864 San Francisco, Twain found hardship, Bohemia, and his voice—transforming from local reporter to rising literary force.
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Not Just the Dog-Eared Pages

Considering a novel as a whole, rather than as the sum of its parts, was an approach favored by mid-20th-century literary critics. It was also useful for fighting book bans.
Mark Twain sits in thought on stone steps surrounded by nature while holding papers

Twain Dreams

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.
Science fiction landscape.

75 Years Ago, "The Martian Chronicles" Legitimized Science Fiction

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.
Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974.

America the Beautiful

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.
Shulamith Firestone, 1997.

When the Battle's Lost and Won

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.
Painting by Earle Richardson titled "Employment of Negroes in Agriculture," 1934.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the Great American Novel

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book
Cartoon of well-dressed arm holding a lit match

The Gilded Age Never Ended

Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.
Robert Frost.

The Many Guises of Robert Frost

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.
Front cover of the 1940 issue Anvil by John C. Rogers showing a muscular man in bold red strokes.

Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism

Anvil's popular vision for a multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent today.
Three covers of the New Yorker, with The New Yorker's logo, a highbrow man in a tophat and monocle, super-imposed over them.

The New Yorker and the American Voice

Tales of the city and beyond.
Three identical pictures of the explosion of an atomic bomb with different coloring.

How Literature Predicted and Portrayed the Atom Bomb

On Pierrepoint B. Noyes, H.G. Wells, and the “Superweapons” of early science-fiction.
Old photo of Zora Neale Hurston laughing and holding a cigarette.

Go Hard or Go Home

On folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who passed away sixty-five years ago today.
Zora Neale Hurston.

Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?
James Baldwin at work on his novel “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone," and smoking.

Refinding James Baldwin

A fascinating new exhibit focuses on Baldwin’s years in Turkey, the country that, in his words, saved his life.
Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: The Original Substacker

Publishing needs his democratic spirit.
Burgundy leather book cover with "Published By The Author" written in gold.
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Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative

"Published by the Author" explores the resourcefulness of Black writers of the nineteenth century.
A painting of a group of Puritans walking through a snowy forest, with the men carrying rifles.

The Puritans Were Book Banners, But They Weren’t Sexless Sourpusses

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.
William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison.

What the Novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison Reveal About the Soul of America

The postwar moment of a distinctive new American novel—Nabokov’s "Lolita"— is also the moment in which William Faulkner finally gained recognition.
Fire (the Magazine) cover with bold words fire in red and other visual illustrations.

A Radical Black Magazine From the Harlem Renaissance Was Ahead of Its Time

Fire!! was a pathbreaking showcase for Black artists and writers “ready to emotionally serve a new day and a new generation.”
The cover of "Martian Time-Slip," featuring a man tending to a farm on Mars.

“Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine

A critique of colonialism from Martian science fiction.
The famous photo of the eyes from The Great Gatsby.

How “The Great Gatsby” Changed the Landscape of New York City

On Robert Moses, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the culture of environmental waste.
Black and white photo of Boston’s Old Corner bookstore (1900).

Bookselling Out

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.
National Book Award seal.

How Historical Fiction Redefined the Literary Canon

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.
Gustav Mahler; Charles Ives.

Anchoring Shards of Memory

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.
Storefront of Nazi-owned "Aryan Book Store" called "Silver Shirt Literature."

Bigoted Bookselling: When the Nazis Opened a Propaganda Bookstore in Los Angeles

On Hitler’s attempt to win Americans over to his cause.
Jason Epstein.

The Man Who Created the Trade Paperback

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

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