The literary masterpiece about Washington: Has any topped Henry Adams’s Democracy?

Thomas Wentworth Higginson visits Emily Dickinson, “my partially cracked poetess at Amherst,” for the first time

Mark Twain, “Taming the Bicycle”

“Here I am”: Philip Roth reflects on his half-century career as a writer

Prairie Fires: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story of poverty, struggle, and reinvention

John Matteson on the “alternately repelling and attracting” electricity between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Margaret Fuller, “Our City Charities”

Intruder in the Dust captures the chilling reality of Jim Crow

Remembering Faulkner scholar Noel Polk (1943–2012)

For Veterans Day: Edith Wharton’s overlooked World War I novel

Willa Cather, “The Namesake”

Bill McKibben demonstrates “how creative resistance can get” in debut novel Radio Free Vermont

Ann Beattie on the short fiction of Peter Taylor: “He just transcends every category”

Adam Gopnik on the Trump moment: “Who wrote this story?”

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly studies bring together two cultures