"I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical..."

"... and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in ...

"The Top 100 Influential Figures in American History."

I'm going to click through all this, beginning with Herman Melville at #100 — he's "the American Shakespeare." Come with ...

"I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing..."

"... and I’d think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writ...

America's "literary flowering" was "a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing."

So how can a real, American literary artist take a job as a creative writing professor? Asks David Gessner. [I]t’s hard to imagine [Thoreau]...

"Illegal pornography ... much of it like today's Calvin Klein underwear ads ."

An obituary for Joel Dorius: [H]is life [as an English professor at Smith College], in Northampton, Mass., crashed on Sept. 2, 1960, when th...

"What scenes would one like to have filmed?"

This is a great question that Robert Hughes asked Vladimir Nabokov in 1965. You can read his answer in one of my favorite books, Strong Opin...

What plays did William Faulkner see? What did he read? I hadn't exactly been wondering, but this article by Javier Marías in Threepenn...

Michael Jackson showed up in court fashionably late in unfashionable sunglasses. The judge, grandly named Melville , seemed to need to cut t...