Brenda Wineapple

In Search of the Real Hannah Crafts

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is thought to be the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside, but only recently have scholars discovered her true identity.

Stifled Rage

Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.

‘The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit’

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad” and who often believed the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

“We live in time; our lives unfold in time and are largely determined by time.”

Living in Words

A new biography explores the life and work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote prodigiously about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

A Fable of Agency

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

New England Ecstasies

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

A Posthumous Life

The great-grandson of a president and the grandson of another, Henry Adams struggled to break free of a personal history intimately tied to that of the country.

Modernist, Humanist, Compromised Faulkner

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Longfellow’s Gentle Phantoms

Our First Authoritarian Crackdown

Wendell Bird’s ‘Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798’

Dress Rehearsal for the Revolution

‘I Have Let Whitman Alone’

Horace Traubel’s monumental chronicle of Whitman’s reflections, ruminations, analyses, and affirmations

The Brilliance of Sybille Bedford

A writer who understood firsthand the burdens of survival