American literature
What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens
It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books
Doomed youth
Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer…
Man of mystic sorrow
John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
Bitter, dark and beautiful
Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century
Up close and personal
In recycling his most intimate encounters as fiction – including amazing feats of promiscuity in small-town New England – John Updike drew unashamedly on his own experiences for inspiration, says Philip Hensher
The sound of nervous laughter
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Trampling out the vintage
John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence…
Elder statesman of the Republic of Letters
Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James…
A pioneer at heart
Richard Davenport-Hines on the tomboy from Red Cloud whose evocation of the vast, unforgiving landscape of the prairies is unrivalled
