The great novelist’s travels in Israel showed him what America had lost
The most swaggering and macho of Jewish writers illuminated postwar America like no one else
The most urgent writers of today are Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, and Elizabeth Bishop
The second in a four-part investigation of our national literature
The first in a four-part excavation of our national literature
From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience
A tale of two Edgars, and the predestination of names
The great critic’s sparkling new tour of American literature illuminates the sublime life of books
Now that you know the novelist’s incestuous secrets, is his newly reissued ‘Mercy of a Rude Stream’ quartet worth reading or not?
The progressive-era novelist’s greedy, red-haired, Polish Jew, Zerkow, is the 20th century’s greatest golem