What the author finds is that Jefferson had an abiding interest in all things medical. He owned more than one hundred medical texts and treatises (about 3 percent of his pre-1815 holdings); counted among his friends a number of noted...
In 1959, a thirty-one-year-old writer named Cynthia Ozick was hard at work, in her determined tortoise-like way, on an ambitious novel that, seven years later, would be published as Trust; and also in 1959, a young, in-your-face writer...
Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he...
One extraordinary feature of Whitman’s legacy is the variety of causes to which he has been summoned to lend support. The treatment of Whitman in mainstream academic anthologies aimed at U.S. high school and college students is a subject...
Midnight: the witching hour, a haunted time, moment of epiphany. It is at this moment that our swaggering national bard, epic chanter of democracy, becomes a tender and delicate solitary, who addresses something wordless and imperishable...
