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The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.
by Jessi Jezewska Stevens via The Nation on April 13, 2020
Sign noting that spitting spreads the Spanish flu.

Trapped on a Ship During a Pandemic

“Either they’ve got no conscience, or they’re not awake to the gravity of the situation.”
by Willa Cather via Lapham’s Quarterly on March 31, 2020

The Seminal Novel About the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Written by a Texan

Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ tells the tale of a pandemic she barely survived.
by Michael Agresta via Texas Monthly on March 25, 2020
The title page of Life and confession of Ann Walters, the female murderess.
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How “Female Fiends” Challenged Victorian Ideals

At a time when questions about women's rights in marriage roiled society, women readers took to the pages of cheap books about husband-murdering wives.
by Dawn Keetley, Erin Blakemore via JSTOR Daily on March 25, 2020

What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About

In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on March 23, 2020
A photo of William Faulkner

The Road to Glory: Faulkner’s Hollywood Years, 1932–1936

Lisa C. Hickman reconstructs William Faulkner’s tumultuous Hollywood sojourn of 1932–1936.
by Lisa C. Hickman via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 27, 2020

Emily Dickinson Escapes

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.
by Lynne Feeley via Boston Review on February 20, 2020
Nicholas Black Elk
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Wounded Knee and the Myth of the Vanished Indian

The story of the 1890 massacre was often about the end of Native American resistance to US expansion. But that’s not how everyone told it.
by Livia Gershon, Lisa Tatonetti via JSTOR Daily on February 17, 2020

Ride Shotgun through Mid-Century LA with Ed Ruscha’s Photos and Jack Kerouac’s Words

A kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.
by Matthew Miller via Aeon on January 7, 2020

The Asian-American Canon Breakers

Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on January 6, 2020

The History of O. Henry's 'The Gift of the Magi'

The beloved Christmas short story may have been dashed off on deadline but its core message has endured.
by Patrick Sauer via Smithsonian on December 23, 2019

Zombie Flu: How the 1919 Influenza Pandemic Fueled the Rise of the Living Dead

Did mass graves in the influenza pandemic help give rise to the living dead?
by Elizabeth Outka via The Conversation on October 28, 2019

“Ulysses” on Trial

It was a setup: a stratagem worthy of wily Ulysses himself.
by Michael Chabon via New York Review of Books on September 13, 2019

Jenny Zhang on Reading Little Women and Wanting to Be Like Jo March

Looking to Louisa May Alcott's heroine for inspiration.
by Jenny Zhang via Literary Hub on August 23, 2019

The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick

For Herman Melville, the color white could be horrifyingly bleak.
by Gabrielle Bellot via Literary Hub on August 1, 2019
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Pulp Fiction Helped Define American Lesbianism

In the 50s and 60s, steamy novels about lesbian relationships, marketed to men, gave closeted women needed representation.
by Erin Blakemore, Yvonne Keller via JSTOR Daily on August 1, 2019

Herman Melville at Home

The novelist drew on far-flung voyages to create his masterpiece. But he could finish it only at his beloved Berkshire farm.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on July 22, 2019

A Universe of One’s Own

Only in the science fiction genre can one compare an alien to a woman.
by Nicole Rudick via New York Review of Books on July 8, 2019
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling in America

What happened to the great defender of Empire when he settled in the States?
by Charles McGrath via The New Yorker on July 1, 2019

Before Stonewall, There Was a Bookstore

Networks of activists transformed Stonewall from an isolated event into a turning point in the struggle for gay power.
by Jim Downs via The Atlantic on June 27, 2019

What Maketh a Man

How queer artist J.C. Leyendecker invented an iconography of twentieth-century American masculinity.
by Tyler Malone via Lapham’s Quarterly on June 10, 2019

“1984” at Seventy

Why we still read Orwell’s book of prophecy.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on June 8, 2019

The Persistent Ghost of Ayn Rand, the Forebear of Zombie Neoliberalism

A review of Lisa Duggan's book, "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.”
by Masha Gessen via The New Yorker on June 6, 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

Whitman, Melville, & Julia Ward Howe: A Tale of Three Bicentennials

The difference between the careers and reputations of the three famous authors is about gender as well as genius.
by Elaine Showalter via New York Review of Books on May 27, 2019
Drawing of a woman being blown away holding a kite made of books

Margaret Fuller on the Social Value of Intellectual Labor and Why Artists Ought to Be Paid

“The circulating medium… is abused like all good things, but without it you would not have had your Horace and Virgil.”
by Maria Popova via The Marginalian on May 23, 2019
Film poster for "Native Son."

"Native Son" and the Cinematic Aspirations of Richard Wright

Novelist Richard Wright yearned to break into film, but Hollywood's censorship of black stories left his aspirations unfulfilled.
by Anna Shechtman via The New Yorker on April 4, 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
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