“Outrageous Errors and Goofs”: David Mikics on the Loony Legacy of MAD

“Jim Crow Was a Cash Grab”: Tyina L. Steptoe on the Harrowing History of the American Color Line

Eyeball and Over-Soul: Biographer James Marcus on the Infinitude of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You Want to Possess the Words”: Jay Parini on Why We Can’t Stop Reading Robert Frost

“Away from the Crowd”: Dan Barry on the Iconoclastic Genius of Jimmy Breslin

Commitment, Capacity, Compassion: Kim E. Nielsen on American Icon Helen Keller

“Calling It an ‘Adventure’ Would Be Redundant”: Novelist Percival Everett on His Explosive Reimagining of Huckleberry Finn

“Southern Weird”: Biographer Mary V. Dearborn on the Transgressive Life and Fiction of Carson McCullers

“The Most Demanding Form”: Theresa M. Towner on William Faulkner’s Radiant Short Fiction

“That Difficult Work of Digging”: Jessica Hooten Wilson on Flannery O’Connor’s Final, Unfinished Novel

“Monstrosities Do Not Come Out of Nowhere”: Lyndsey Stonebridge on the Timely Political Lessons of Hannah Arendt

“Someone Shone a Light Suddenly into the Darkness”: James G. Basker on Uncovering the Vital Voices of Black Americans During the Founding Era

“Extremely Orderly and Uncrazy”: Benjamin Taylor on His Revelatory New Biography of Willa Cather

Moby-Reddick: Merve Emre on John A. Williams’s Great American Novel

“She Served Me Elk Once”: Documentarian Arwen Curry on Her Decade-Long Encounter with Ursula K. Le Guin

“Every Variety of Madness and Malevolence”: Geoffrey O’Brien on American Crime Fiction in the 1960s