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We are in the midst in the United States, the world’s foremost capitalist country, of a surge of interest in Socialism. Many Americans contend, or at least have begun to imagine, that Socialism might remedy income inequality, limited or flawed health-care, poverty, hunger, and other ongoing social and economic problems. Yet few Americans know much about the history of Socialism, and about its major...
Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work...
Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose...
Brilliantly written, powerfully argued, The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1948, is flawed for readers today because of serious gaps and omissions, in particular its lack of reference to African American figures and sources. Late in his career, Hofstadter began to broaden his range of reference, calling attention in vivid prose to the horrors of slavery during the...
The year 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. His plays are read, interpreted, and performed throughout the United States and the world, and from the early seventeenth century onward, the praise bestowed on him is hyperbolic, as if he were superhuman, even divine. Biographies of Shakespeare abound and often are informative, but not about Shakespeare himself, for we know very little...
Ernest Hemingway’s aesthetic—a better term than style—is based on constant acts of choice, decisions that he makes as a writer at every moment about which word and phrase to set down on the page. All writers must make choices—what to include, what to exclude. Hemingway is special because his work as a writer foregrounds this fact. The structure of Hemingway’s sentences makes the reader keenly aware...
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