In the early winter of 1821, a ship called the Nautilus sailed from Richmond, Virginia, to West Africa. Aboard were thirty-three “free people of colou... Read More...

At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans expanded the city’s streetcar service and, for the use of black patrons, incorporated Star cars into the... Read More...

In his seminal American Renaissance, Frances Otto Matthiessen points to the development by Nathaniel Hawthorne of tragic elements of character, noting... Read More...

“King of the Assholes, drama queen, Red Bull’d 12-year old, Next Chappelle, strangely relatable Megaman,” Black supremacist, hypocrite, poet, social c... Read More...

Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “efore you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning” (Existentialism and Human Emotion... Read More...

Winner of the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize   According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we live i... Read More...

Special Mention in the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize   According to Dale Bailey, “since Poe first described the House of Usher in 1839, the mot... Read More...

The trail across the sky retraces periodically, for as a universal force, outside of history, Brown is an archetype or prototype, a meteor that recurs... Read More...

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shal... Read More...

The structural and literary symbolism of the horizon/horizontality is one of the most powerful and versatile devices in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gil... Read More...

The opening lines to Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping famously locate the novel in two literary genealogies. Evoking the opener of Melvill... Read More...

We remain unknown to ourselves. Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3. Nietzsche places this declaration right at the beginning of his Genealo... Read More...

In 2014, the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, completed a trilogy of books set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa.  Th... Read More...

Since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), Marilynne Robinson has built up a large body of non-fiction that sits beside, and in di... Read More...

Special Mention in the 2016 W.T.M Riches Essay Prize This essay explores the (sub)merged worlds depicted in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (... Read More...

Posterity In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young man, he yearned to become a professional wr... Read More...

Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize   In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Sus... Read More...

Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively under the control of women, yet it is approximately true that the so... Read More...

Introduction In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir stories, identity is continually re-constructed through memory. Paul White states that “shifts in ide... Read More...

Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and best known for her texts on the struggles of immigrants in America. She a... Read More...

In September 2008, Gary Lutz, author of several collections of short fiction, delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to the stu... Read More...

In a 1967 interview with his former student and future annotator, Alfred Appel, Vladimir Nabokov announced, “Philosophically, I am an indivisible moni... Read More...

Winner of the 2013 WTM Riches Essay Prize   “It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike loo... Read More...

This article, and the research out of which it springs, has a number of points of origin; it may also have more than one point of conclusion even as i... Read More...

Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, 2014 IAAS Annual Conference   There is a famous story about Lyndon Johnson’s White House.  In some versions, ... Read More...

Introduction So we are here, knowing they are “gone to burning hell”, she with a lie on her lips, protecting him, he with her blood on him. Perhaps B... Read More...

One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De Tocqueville observed that democracy tended to... Read More...

In 1975, Richard Yates published what was widely considered to be his worst novel. Disturbing the Peace was dismissed by critics as a career-ending di... Read More...

American author Carson McCullers visited Ireland three times. The first two visits were to the ancestral home of Anglo-Irish novelist and short story ... Read More...

Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009): Compiled and introduced by Louise Walsh

What if the Government Schooling Campaigns to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place?

Crooning, Catering, and Changing Careers: Anne Tyler’s and Don Cherry’s Bands (and Bonds) of Gold

[R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise: Robert Lowell’s Elegiac Poetry

David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline

“Tierra entre medio”: Borderlands of Knowledge in the Art of Frida Kahlo

DeLillo’s Underworld is one of the most celebrated of all modern American novels, and perhaps the most complex. This complexity is a product of its extraordinarily precise yet oblique chronological structure, which, in its attempt to account for the entire second-half of the twentieth-century, has challenged all its readers, confused many of them, and alienated some.