E. L. Doctorow pays tribute to Herman Melville’s great “kitchen-sink sort of book”

Watch: Why Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day isn’t “victors’ history”

Adam Gopnik: The secret behind John Updike’s productivity

Documentary project locates Walt Whitman’s “multitudes” in today’s Deep South

Gabrielle Bellot: James Baldwin as “a prophet of love” in If Beale Street Could Talk

Revisiting Portnoy‘s complaints, 50 years later, with Bernard Avishai

Madeleine L’Engle on A Wrinkle in Time: “It’s for people”

Watch: Leonard S. Marcus on his first meeting with a “totally engaged” Madeleine L’Engle

Watch: A Wrinkle in Time was only the beginning

Remembering Tom Wolfe, New Journalism pioneer and champion of literary realism, 1930–2018

Watch: Ayana Mathis, Albert Murray, and “the old Clotilda”

Historian Eric Foner: “In some sense, Reconstruction never ended”

Adam Gopnik on the Trump moment: “Who wrote this story?”

Talented New York trio finds the music in Jack Kerouac’s poetry and prose

Novelist Thomas Mallon on why we need Mary McCarthy more than ever

Thomas Mallon: Shut off cable news and read Eudora Welty instead