Listen: Lauren Groff introduces the “wickedly smart” Nancy Hale

“A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag

Mary Berry: Extending Wendell Berry’s legacy is “the most hopeful work I can think of”

LOA celebrates Herman Melville’s 200th birthday with his Complete Poems

Thomas Mallon on Booth Tarkington: “he sees things through to their bitter, true conclusion”

John Logan on James Fenimore Cooper: “Dive in and get reading”

The Forties we thought we knew: Facing the Abyss with George Hutchinson

“She was a writer, and her subject was movies”—new documentary celebrates Pauline Kael ahead of her 100th birthday

Rick Atkinson on Cornelius Ryan’s “vivid, visceral, riveting” histories of World War II

Walt Whitman speaks!—embraces multitudes, and becomes our contemporary

“Andrew Johnson must learn”: Brenda Wineapple on our first presidential impeachment

Nation-building in a war of insurgency: Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution

John Schulian: The “deadline artists” who brought the sports pages to life

Stony the Road: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on Reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow

Liz Petry on her mother, Ann Petry: private but dedicated to service—and her art

Always Coming Home: The Ursula K. Le Guin book that breaks the novel form “wide open”