Stephen Colbert’s two-minute Moby-Dick lesson is a real roller-coaster ride

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