Obituaries for Toni Morrison, who died on August 5, remember her as a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, a black woman novelist, and the last great American novelist—never a Catholic novelist. Morrison converted to Catholicism at age twelve but stood aloof from the Church for years. Despite a few . . . . Continue Reading »
On the basis of a sixty-second clip, thousands of prominent Americans rushed to denounce the students of Covington Catholic High School. The students’ alleged crime was mobbing an American Indian activist named Nathan Phillips while wearing “Make America Great Again” caps. Respectable people . . . . Continue Reading »
This year marks the centenary of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, and we can thank Viola Roseboro for its creation. Continue Reading »
In South and West, her newly published notes from 1970, Didion checks into a series of motels on her trek across the Gulf South, a region sunk in history. Continue Reading »
Though only the first act of Denis Johnson’s Angels takes place in transit, the book has the feel of a road novel—specifically, an American road novel. The story is straightforward: Two people, Jamie Mays and Bill Houston, meet aboard a Greyhound. One is in flight from an unfaithful . . . . Continue Reading »
It should have been easy for Herman Melville to hate Manhattan—the “Babylonish brick-kilns of New York,” as he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. It was there in Manhattan he was born in 1819, at 6 Pearl Street, down by the Battery, while his ambitious, hard-driven father busily bankrupted . . . . Continue Reading »
Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »
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