Youth on the Edge: The Outsiders and the Struggle for Identity in 1960s America
When S. E. Hinton published The Outsiders in 1967, she was just a teenager herself—a fact…
The Burden of Memory, The Absence of Moral Clarity: Reconsidering Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Beloved has long been enshrined as a pillar of American literature—a haunting meditation on…
The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The Catcher and the Rye
When The Catcher in the Rye was first published in 1951, it scandalized and captivated in…
A Future Already Lived: Brave New World in the Age of Algorithm and Apathy
When Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, he was imagining a nightmare. Nearly a…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Kesey’s Classic Still Shocks and Startles
When One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in 1962, America was poised between buttoned-up…
Jane Eyre: Moral Defiance in a World of Compromise
There are novels so rooted in the literary landscape that their outlines seem familiar even to…
Moby Dick: The Harpoon and the Human Condition
There are novels that tell a story, and there are novels that attempt to swallow the…
The Enduring Wildness of Jack London’s Classic: The Call of the Wild
Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, first published in 1903, has the stripped-down intensity of…
The Monster in the Mirror: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Still Haunts Us
It begins in the cold, with a letter written amid the ice. And it ends, still…
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and the Epic of Compassion
Victor Hugo did not write short books, and he certainly did not write small ones. Les…
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