<p><span class="deck">At a time when many are concerned by the nation’s loss of the unassailable economic position it occupied just after World War II, one historian argues that our real strength and our real peril lie elsewhere.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The author walks us through literary Boston at its zenith. But Boston being what it is, we also come across the Revolution, ward politics, and the great fire.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Walt Whitman said, “The real war will never get in the books.” The critic and writer Paul Fussell feels that the same sanitizing of history that went on after the 1860s has erased the national memory of what World War II was really like.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For a hundred years now ,Americans have been reading as comedy Mark Twain’s dark indictment of chivalry, technology, and all of humanity.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Fewer than half of O. Henry’s short stories actually take place in New York, but we still see the city through his eyes.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">On the 25th anniversary of the most controversial historical novel in memory, the author of <em><span class="typestyle"> The Confessions of Nat Turner</span> </em>speaks of a novelist’s duty to history and fiction’s strange power not only to astonish, but to enrage.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The American Revolution was in fact a bitter civil war, and a remarkable book offers us perhaps the most intimate picture we have of what it was like for the ordinary people who got caught in its terrible machinery.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Theodore Dreiser’s stark realism brought the American novel into the 20th century. He paid a heavy price for his candor.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">They cost five cents more than regular comic books, and the extra nickel was supposed to buy what we now call cultural literacy. But they were controversial from the very start.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A TEXAS MARINE WHO DREW BEAUTIFULLY AND WROTE AS WELL AS HE DREW BECAME THE LAUREATE OF THE MEN WHO CHECKED THE LAST GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVE. ALL BUT FORGOTTEN TODAY, HIS 1926 BESTSELLER REMAINS PERHAPS THE FINEST ACCOUNT OF AMERICANS IN THE GREAT WAR.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A distinguished scholar of American literature discusses why, after a career of study and reflection, he believes that Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are bad for you.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A BOLD NEW KIND OF COLLEGE COURSE BRINGS the student directly to the past, non-stop, overnight, in squalor and glory, for weeks on end.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">People have been waiting for the great American novel ever since Civil War days. But John Dos Passos may have written it 60 years ago.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> ALBERT MURRAY SEES AMERICAN CULTURE AS AN</lead_in> incandescent fusion of European, Yankee, frontier, and black. And he sees what he calls the “blues idiom” as the highest expression of that culture. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A life-long fascination with the stories of a famous pioneering family finally drove the writer to South Dakota in hopes of better understanding the prairie life that Laura Ingalls Wilder lived there and later gave to the world.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">In attempting to tell the story of our century by retrieving the subtlest nuances of the past, a historian makes an audacious foray into a new sort of literature.</span></p>
