Latest posts
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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…
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Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: The Poem That Invented American Poetry
In the summer of 1855, a Brooklyn printer set type for a thin quarto of twelve untitled poems and put his own name nowhere on the title page. There was,…
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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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Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter: Guilt and the Puritan Shadow
The most subversive thing about The Scarlet Letter is that its heroine never repents. Hester Prynne wears the embroidered “A” that her Puritan neighbors…
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Huckleberry Finn and the American Voice
Why is Huckleberry Finn important to American literature?
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F. Scott Fitzgerald Beyond Gatsby
What should I read by Fitzgerald after Gatsby?
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Where to Start With Ernest Hemingway
Which Hemingway novel should I read first?
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Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan, Mars, and Pulp Adventure
Where should I start with Edgar Rice Burroughs?
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The Great American Novel: A Reader’s Map
What is the great American novel?