Why The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest hour—and why an authoritative text matters

The pathbreaking Virginia Hamilton and her “liberation literature”

“Language as a weapon against the seemingly incomprehensible” in three war memoirs

David L. Ulin on the early Joan Didion: Dread, disruption, and “a writer responding to her moment”

“Engaging, embracing, confiding, and humane”—David Quammen on the work of E. O. Wilson

Meet S. J. Perelman, the “writer’s writer” who was audacious, original, and funny

Ben Yagoda: Presenting an O. Henry for the twenty-first century

Larry Lockridge: Why it’s time to reassess Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit

“You’re not reading your grandfather’s short story”— Charles McGrath on the fiction of Donald Barthelme

Donald R. Hickey on The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence

Endpapers: A family story about books, belonging, and the bloodlands of 20th-century Europe

The worlds of Octavia E. Butler: “There’s real danger in these stories”

Nicholas Lemann: Challenges to American democracy are “ever-present”

“She was a writer, and her subject was movies”—new documentary celebrates Pauline Kael ahead of her 100th birthday

Robert W. Trogdon on Ernest Hemingway’s Paris years, “a magical time for modern literature”

Ron Hansen on the Western, a “distinctly American mythology”