As Stanley Crouch likes to tell the tale, he and Philip Roth were having dinner in an up-scale New York City restaurant one evening shortly before their respective novels—The Human Stain in Roth’s case, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome in...
In her highly acclaimed first book, Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene focused on a little known patch of the large and complex quilt that is the Southern civil rights movement. She peopled it with characters who were both courageous...
John Moncure Daniel was ever quick to attack what he saw as wrong. He minced no words during the seven years he spent as a top American diplomat, including a moment which may have deeply affected the history of Italy. Subsequently, Daniel...
Unfortunately, Robert Boyers, in his Lionel Trilling, succumbs to this temptation to imitate his subject’s style; and this fault gravely weakens his attempt to renew Trilling’s value for modern criticism and culture.
“Nineteen men in two distinct groups rode forward from the coalescing Confederate lines west of Chancellors-ville at about 9:00 p. m. on May 2, 1863. Only seven of the nineteen came back untouched, man or horse . . . Major General A.P. Hill...
Norcross, 37, is not hardhearted. It’s only that if you operate a drawbridge on a navigable waterway in the United States, the First Commandment is unambiguous: thou shalt open the bridge when the ship gets there. You don’t ask the ship to...
On Oct. 19, 1865, the day after he finished the “Jumping Frog” story, Sam Clemens wrote to his brother and sister-in-law that he had at last found his vocation—”seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.” Written across...
