Latest posts
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Sea Stories: Melville, Conrad, and the Ocean as Fate
There is a kind of book that cannot happen on land. Not because the action requires water, but because the sea does something to character that a drawing…
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Thoreau’s Walden: The Case for Living Deliberately
On the Fourth of July, 1845 — Independence Day, and Thoreau chose the date on purpose — a Harvard-educated handyman and sometime schoolteacher moved into…
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Tom Sawyer and the Lost World of American Boyhood
Mark Twain called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer “a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air.” It is a revealing thing to say about a book that…
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The Last of the Mohicans: Cooper and the Frontier Myth
James Fenimore Cooper subtitled The Last of the Mohicans “A Narrative of 1757,” and the date is the first thing worth pausing on. He published the book in…
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The Wizard of Oz: America’s Own Fairy Tale
In the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, L. Frank Baum made a quiet declaration of independence. The old fairy tales, he wrote,…
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Dashiell Hammett and the Invention of Hard-Boiled Crime
Before Dashiell Hammett, the detective was a brain in a chair. Poe’s Dupin reasoned out crimes from his armchair; Conan Doyle’s Holmes deduced a man’s…
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Moby-Dick: Why the Great American Novel Is About a Whale
It is the strangest fact in American literature: the country’s candidate for the greatest novel ever written by one of its citizens is a book about…
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The American Renaissance: How a Nation Found Its Literature
In 1850 the United States was seventy-four years old and had, by the lights of European critics, produced almost no literature worth the name. Sydney…
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‘Song of Myself’: A Guide to Whitman’s Great Poem
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” the poem begins, and a reader meeting it for the first time can be forgiven for flinching at the apparent vanity.…
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John Carter of Mars: Burroughs’s Other Mythology
In 1911, a failed pencil-sharpener salesman in Chicago, deep in debt and convinced he could write garbage at least as well as the garbage filling the pulp…