Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, was published in March. (April 2012)
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Working in the Dark
April 26, 2012
Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
by Natalie Dykstra
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A Tumor for Mr. Mutt?
March 22, 2012
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The Far-Apart Artists
January 12, 2012
My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915–1933
edited by Sarah Greenough
Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 13, 2011–January 2, 2012
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
edited by Barbara Haskell, with essays by Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, and contributions by Sasha Nicholas
Alfred Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light
by Katherine Hoffman
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Mitt, We Hardly Knew Ye!
November 10, 2011
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Why Tolstoy, Lenin, Van Gogh, and America Were Hit by It
October 27, 2011
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America
by David S. Reynolds
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The Afterglow of John La Farge
June 23, 2011
John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891
an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, October 19, 2010–January 2, 2011; and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, January 22–March 27, 2011
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The Long Shot
May 12, 2011
Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances
by Scott Brown
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Winslow Homer: The Stern Facts
March 24, 2011
Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War
by Peter H. Wood
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Emily’s Revolution
November 25, 2010
Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries
by Helen Vendler
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Strangely Sinister in Saratoga
August 19, 2010
The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America
by Geoffrey O'Brien
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‘The Real Critter’
June 24, 2010
On Whitman
by C.K. Williams
Three American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville
by William C. Spengemann
Song of Myself and Other Poems
by Walt Whitman, selected and introduced by Robert Hass
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The Mysterious Mythmaker of New York
April 29, 2010
Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York
by Elizabeth L. Bradley
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The Age of Teddy
January 14, 2010
Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920
by Jackson Lears
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The Escape of the Collyers
December 17, 2009
Homer & Langley
by E.L. Doctorow
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Mary McCarthy’s Room
October 8, 2009
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by Elaine Showalter
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Transcendental Woman
May 14, 2009
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Public Years
by Charles Capper
Margaret Fuller: Wandering Pilgrim
by Meg McGavran Murray
Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
edited by Joel Myerson
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The Storm Over Robert Frost
December 4, 2008
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
edited by Mark Richardson
Fall of Frost
by Brian Hall
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher
by Peter J. Stanlis, with an introduction by Timothy Steele
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Melville’s Second Act
June 26, 2008
Melville: The Making of the Poet
by Hershel Parker
Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine
by Robert Milder
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The Unpacific Pacific
March 6, 2008
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The Shock of Intrusion
December 6, 2007
Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853
by George Feifer
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Three Ways of Looking at Thomas Eakins
March 29, 2007
Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist
by Henry Adams
The Revenge of Thomas Eakins
by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick
Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins
by William S. McFeely
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The Convert
February 15, 2007
Emma Lazarus
by Esther Schor
Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems
edited by John Hollander
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The View from the Bridge
August 10, 2006
Brookland
by Emily Barton
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The Making of a Poet
February 23, 2006
Summer Doorways: A Memoir
by W.S. Merwin
Present Company
by W.S. Merwin
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Patriotic Gore
October 20, 2005
The March
by E.L. Doctorow
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American Jeremiad
September 22, 2005
The American Classics: A Personal Essay
by Denis Donoghue.
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The Art of Consolation
April 28, 2005
Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
by Helen Vendler
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Their Ignorance and Majesty
April 29, 2004
Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
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The Art of Disaster
December 4, 2003
Goya
by Robert Hughes
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A Tale of Two Iliads
September 25, 2003
De l’Iliade by Rachel Bespaloff
On the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff, translated from the Frenchby Mary McCarthy, with an introduction by Hermann Broch
Lettres à Jean Wahl, 1937–1947 by Rachel Bespaloff, edited by Monique Jutrin
The Iliad or The Poem of Force
by Simone Weil, translated from the French by Mary McCarthy
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Emily Dickinson’s Secret Lives
January 17, 2002
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Alfred Habegger
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Tea with Okakura
May 25, 2000
Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 23, 1999-March 26, 2000. an exhibition at Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan,, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Saeko Yamawaki, by Nobuko Sakamoto, by Makiko Yamada, by Hitomi Sato
The Book of Tea
by Kakuzo Okakura
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‘The Poet Position’
October 21, 1999
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The Mystery of Emily Dickinson
April 8, 1999
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition
edited by R.W. Franklin
Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
edited by Ellen Louise Hart, by Martha Nell Smith
The Emily Dickinson Handbook
edited by Gudrun Grabher, by Roland Hagenbüchle, by Cristanne Miller
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Unreliable Source
March 4, 1999
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The Courage of Stephen Crane
March 16, 1989
Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry edited by J.C. Levenson
The Correspondence of Stephen Crane
edited by Stanley Wertheim, edited by Paul Sorrentino
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Inconstant Anderson
January 30, 1986
Letters to Bab
by Sherwood Anderson, edited by William A. Sutton
Kit Brandon by Sherwood Anderson
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Advertising Counsel
October 10, 1985
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Poet in the Sun Belt
May 9, 1985
Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection edited by Mary Jarrell
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How to Be the Photograph
December 13, 2011
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Someone Else's Children
November 28, 2011
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Mitt, We Hardly Knew Ye!
October 3, 2011
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Lost Rituals, Found Poems
January 7, 2011
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Under Fire: Mark Hewitt's 'Big-Assed' Pots
September 8, 2010
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Emily Dickinson in the Bronx
July 21, 2010