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Literature
We've gotten one farce after another from the secretive judges at the Swedish Academy who confer the world's most prestigious prize for literature.
Last year’s scandal surrounding the Nobel Prize for Literature was only the latest in a history almost too farcical for Moliere.
A Pair of Distinguished Contemporary Authors Weigh In On A Nineteenth-Century Genius: Mark Twain
Every successful musician sooner or later makes an album of standards, the familiar pieces he or she has loved and learned from over the years.
Sinclair Lewis Wins the Nobel for literature.
Women’s history today is no longer a backwater; nor is the profession of history a male craft.
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Those Yanks of World War II are white-haired now. Great-grandchildren play about their feet. The grand parades and great commemorations are over. Only a few monuments to their achievements are yet to be built.
On a high Vermont hill, where Robert Frost liked to absorb the sound of trees, he and I talked through many afternoons, speaking, as Frost put it, “to some purpose.” He held forth on astronomy, mortality, baseball, poetry, and prose, displaying a command of phrase that I have n
Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation, America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S.
The literature pants harder and harder to keep up with the proliferation of innovations, but, with a gun to my head, this is for the general reader looking for a short list of books that are technically sophisticated, yet highly readable.
In 1800, the United States was an underdeveloped nation of just over five million people. It was a society shaped by immigration, but immigrants from one country, Great Britain, made up around half the population.
“Popular culture” is not the opposite of or the alternative to something called “high culture.” It is not degraded, debased, simple, or undisciplined. Nor is it defined primarily by its mass appeal or commercial values.
No one has ever come up with a satisfactory count of the books dealing with the Civil War. Estimates range from 50,000 to more than 70,000, with new titles added every day.
In a nation of immigrants, picking ten books about the immigrant experience is no easy task. One could plausibly argue that any book about post-Columbian America concerns the immigrant experience.
Americans have always envisioned a west. When they won independence from England in 1783, the west lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a west celebrated in the adventures of Daniel Boone. Then, people began to thread through the Cumberland Gap to make new homes there.
The assignment—to select 10 books suitable for a lay reader that cover American history between the Constitution and the 1850s—sounds easier than it is.
I’ve been fighting the war of the American Revolution (on paper, that is) off and on since 1962, and my research has included journals, diaries, letters, newspapers, and books on nearly all the campaigns.
In 1804, an obscure English sailor named John Davis published an imaginative account of the seventeenth-century romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and called it The First Settlers of Virginia, An Historical Novel.
Biography is an almost writer-proof art. Structure and raison d’être are taken care of in advance. The form—someone is born, does stuff, dies—is as rigid and soothing as the sonnet.
A talk with the superb journalist and sports reporter who was the co-author of MASH and wrote Ernest Hemingway’s favorite fight novel
Elevating the frontier ethos over the decadent ways of people in the urban east
In April of 1902, Owen Wister’s Western novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains was published. It was an immediate hit, selling 50,000 copies within four months and 100,000 within a year. It remained in print for decades.
He wrote down everything he saw in a career that stretched from the Civil War well into this century.
Sometimes, if you wait long enough, things just work out.
Being a millionaire no longer counts for much if you’re consumed by the desire to be rich, and it counts for even less if you’re consumed by the desire to be famous.
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water."
Mark Twain
America acted deeply on the Elizabethan English imagination, working its magic in the minds of poets and men of science
During the reign of Elizabeth I, as the interest in and knowledge of America gathered momentum, so their reverberation in literature and the arts became louder, more frequent, and more varied.
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