The Escape, first published play by an African American, leaps to the New York City stage

Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”

J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer “recognized the permanent cleft in the American character”

Sportswriter Alexander Wolff: “Basketball becomes a way of working through things”

Brooks D. Simpson: Faithfulness to the historical record places race at the center of Reconstruction

Science fiction authority presents a Universe-expanding exhibition in New York City

Cultural panic and overwhelming change: Richard White looks back on America’s first Gilded Age

Jefferson’s Daughters: Catherine Kerrison measures the chasm between the rhetoric and reality of revolution

Wendell Berry on the “talkers and storytellers” of Port William, Kentucky

Mark Ford: Echoes and experimentation in John Ashbery’s “most expansive decade”

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

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”

Friends Divided: Gordon S. Wood on the complicated relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell: Jack Kerouac and the “universal experience of being alive”

Laura Dassow Walls: “We have misread Thoreau, tragically”