Sean Wilentz: Richard Hofstadter and the “paranoid style” as an American phenomenon

The Saddest Words: Michael Gorra on reading Faulkner now

Susan Ware: Race, region, and the full story of the fight for women’s suffrage

Monique Truong: Lafacadio Hearn’s wandering life as a search for home

Martin J. Sherwin: At his core, Jonathan Schell was a philosopher

American Conservatism: An “intellectual tradition worthy of respect and consideration”

Madison Smartt Bell on Robert Stone, restless chronicler of physical and moral extremity

Susan K. Harris: The round-the-world trip that made Mark Twain an anti-imperialist

For pleasure or as a spiritual discipline, bird-watching is “a lesson in respect and humility”

(Re)introducing the “decidedly unsentimental and modern” Constance Fenimore Woolson

New “passion project” documentary Flannery reveals the writer who revealed mysteries

Kathryn Davis on the novels of Jean Stafford: “She never sentimentalized anything”

Shadow Archives: Scholar experiences “the thrill of literary detective work” in collections of Ellison, Petry, and others

“One backward glance” — Daniel H. Weiss on Michael O’Donnell and the tragic era of Vietnam

Love unknown: Thomas Travisano on the life and worlds of Elizabeth Bishop

Nicholas Kristof shifts his focus to the crisis at home: “Attention does make a difference”