Sarah Weinman on Women Crime Writers: “They had their own stories to tell . . . in distinct, sometimes ruthless ways”

Arthur Miller at 100: a “loving embrace of humanity’s frailties”

Darryl Pinckney: James Baldwin “stood his ground and paid a price”

New York exhibition showcases Lynd Ward as both pioneering graphic novelist and master illustrator

Lewis Dabney on Edmund Wilson, “a storyteller, a master of exposition and compressed intellectual analysis”

Gordon S. Wood: How the American Revolution “infused into our culture our noblest ideals and highest aspirations”

Todd Tietchen: “It took a while for literary culture to catch up with what Kerouac had accomplished”

Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting

Reinhold Niebuhr combined “tough-minded political realism with a sympathetic understanding of society’s injustices”

Virgil Thomson, the music critic who “managed to demystify an art that was often regarded as otherworldly”

Jed Perl: how the lives of visual artists were “woven together with the lives of novelists, poets, and intellectuals”

Gregg Sutter on Elmore Leonard’s “dialogue-driven crime novels with an emphasis on character”

Susan Cheever on Louisa May Alcott: “A writer who refused conventional ideas of women’s roles”

Dan Wakefield on Kurt Vonnegut: “If anything he was a counter-counter-culture hero”

James Shapiro on how American attitudes toward Shakespeare keep changing

Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”