Latest posts
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The Invention of Julius Caesar: How a Man Became a Myth
On the Ides of March, 44 BC, a balding fifty-five-year-old Roman politician was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators at the foot of a statue…
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Dante’s Inferno: A Traveler’s Guide to Hell
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” So begins the most famous…
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Conan the Cimmerian: Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Sword and Sorcery
In June 1936, in Cross Plains, Texas, a thirty-year-old man learned that his mother would not wake from her final coma. He walked out to his car, took a…
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The Invention of Jane Austen: How a Spinster Became a Global Brand
When Jane Austen died at Winchester in July 1817, at the age of forty-one, she was an unmarried woman of small means whose novels had been published…
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The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s Haunted America
“The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable…
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Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novelist of the Industrial Age
When Charles Dickens wanted a writer who could make the cotton mills of the north feel like a moral emergency rather than a statistical abstraction, he…
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Zane Grey and Riders of the Purple Sage: The Novel That Fixed the Western
Close your eyes and picture a Western. The lone rider on the ridge, dressed in black, gun low on the hip. The vast sweep of red rock and sagebrush. The…
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Achilles: The Hero Who Chose a Short, Bright Life
Achilles knew. That is the detail the popular image of him — the invincible warrior, the heel, the rage — tends to bury, and it is the detail…
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Norse Myth vs Greek Myth: Two Ways to Imagine the Gods
The Greek gods are immortal. The Norse gods are doomed. Everything else — the temperament, the humor, the moral weather, the kind of hero each world…
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Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone: The First Great Detective Novel
T. S. Eliot called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels,” and the verdict has held for a century and a half, which…