On Oct. 19, 1865, the day after he finished the “Jumping Frog” story, Sam Clemens wrote to his brother and sister-in-law that he had at last found his vocation—”seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.” Written across...
Readers will not be disappointed with the wealth of material covered. Entries on individual artists are logically arranged to include information on his or her life and works; working methods and techniques, writings (if any), character and...
Future historians who try to assess contemporary developments in Greece may be inclined to give a great deal of weight to the military junta that ruled the country from April 1967 until July 1974. They would be wrong. The junta, born in...
Robert Boyers has written a subtle and rewarding study of R. P. Blackmur. He comments well on the central terms and concepts in Blackmur’s criticism, and he provides sharp and sensible examinations of the famous essays on Yeats, Eliot...
Do read it. It’s fun, oftentimes enlightening, once in a while quite irritating, highly readable. After all, Dwight, in single combat, grappled with most issues of the last century, from the Depression to the nuclear arms race, socialism to...
Once upon a time, a French academic domiciled in the United States thought it would be a good idea to mark the opening of his university’s newly instituted Humanities Center by holding a conference on Structuralism, the philosophic system...
Historians looking back at the tragic events of September 11 will discover the roots of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon originating in three episodes that occurred in 1979. The first event was the Iranian...
There is no other book quite like this, a detailed analysis of the debates over national budget priorities all the way from 1932 to 2002. It could hardly appear at a better time, as President Bush launches the most controversial budget in...
There were a dozen of them in the tiny, crowded space, loud with talk and typewriters, and they were busy getting out the little eight-page daily that gave them their chance to live in Paris in the Nineteen Twenties.