Michael Gorra

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

What Fear Feels Like

Paul Auster’s biography of Stephen Crane captures the life of a writer who found his material in “extreme situations…matters of life and death: war, poverty, and physical danger.”

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

Philip’s Theater

Philip Roth drew and smudged and drew again the line between life and art, and with every book it became harder to distinguish between them.

The Sense of an Ending

On Don DeLillo’s late style.

The Suspicion of Expertise

Jim Crow & William Faulkner

Faulkner didn’t enjoy much local popularity when he was alive, not even after he won the Nobel Prize. He told too many inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.”

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Sketches from Solitude

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

A Heritage of Evil

Three books dealing with memory and historical witness

Loving with a Stiff Upper Lip

Southern Discomfort

Shaping Stories to Make Sense of Ourselves

The Nose of the Master

For Henry James’s seventieth birthday in 1913 a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint him.

Nine Lives

Losing the American Tone

The Portrait of Miss Bart

For a century and more readers have found an awful fascination in watching Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

The Girl at the Florist’s

Deep into Green

The history and meaning of a color

The Brilliant Explorations of Elizabeth Spencer