I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The ...

Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare invitation to “Her ...

From the essay “Dear Friends,” which was published in the Winter 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review. i have a friend who has never read a single word I have written. I love being with her. i have a ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...

I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended ...

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a ...

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean ...

Does anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll ...

May I be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities? The novel’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is driving over the Triborough Bridge in New York ...

Barry C. Lynn is the executive director of the Open Markets Institute and the author of the forthcoming book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, from which ...

This month, on February 1, Iowa’s caucuses mark the true beginning of the presidential-election season — the process by which the nation, at least in theory, has its say about the fundamentals of its ...

W hen I pulled the used copy of Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes out of its white plastic mailer it felt oddly light for a book of its girth, its center of gravity not exactly ...