Brenda Wineapple

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