Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2025 i The American Scholar

It has been a summer of floods. Not just in the Texas Hill Country, where the rapid rise of the Guadalupe River led to catastrophe on the Fourth of July, but all over America. With images of these disasters in mind, I reread William Faulkner's “Old Man,” a long story set during the devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It's the tale of two convicts at the state prison farm in Parchman who are sent to rescue a woman trapped in a cypress tree and a man stranded on the roof of a cotton house. Almost immediately, the convicts become separated. One ends up back at Parchman, but the other continues his quest. And though he cannot find the man atop the cotton house, he manages to save the woman,…

I gave no thought to a dining room. To the extent that I had a dining room at all, it functioned mainly as an office: my typewriter, during daytime hours, was placed on a table that my first husband saved from curbside trash pickup at his uncle's house (I believe on our one visit) and that I ended up keeping after the divorce. It consists of one very long board of some sort of fairly thick wood and is quite heavy, though one wonky leg does make it slightly wobble. I see it now once a year, as it resides with friends in Florida. I always appreciated that it did double duty as a daytime desk and evening dining table, though it was so narrow that guests sitting opposite each…

In the years leading up to his death last September, at age 83, Pete Rose had come to accept that he would not live to see what he wanted most—his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose was banished from the game in 1989 after betting on it, and he spent his remaining decades decrying his exile: moving to Las Vegas, signing memorabilia for cash, fumbling various attempts to gain reinstatement. His case has been dissected in sporting circles with all the gravitas of two philosophy professors debating the existence of God. Yes, Rose broke the rules and undermined the game, but he is also baseball's Hit King, compiling 4,256 with a relentless competitiveness that few have since matched. The defining image is of Rose airborne like a superhero…

STEVE YARBROGH is the author of numerous works offiction, including The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, and Prisoners of War, which was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent novel is Stay Gone Days. He is professor emeritus at Emerson College. In 1971, Alfred A. Knopf published a debut novel by a young poet from Mississippi, who prior to becoming a writer had played offensive tackle on the Vanderbilt University football team. Eponymously titled Joiner, the book is narrated by Eugene “Sonny” Joiner, like its author a native of the Magnolia State, as well as a keen student of philosophy, religion, history, literature, and art. Joiner is himself a former college football star, good enough to have played a year in the NFL with the…

Set beside the splendor of the classical past, present-day reality can seem, well, pretty lame. In “Hephaestus,” John Tripoulas takes up this theme and gives it a poignant turn. The Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens is a splendid ancient artwork. With arms extended in either direction, the radiant male figure prepares to hurl a weapon, which is missing. Scholars debate whether the statue represents Zeus or Poseidon and whether the weapon would have been a thunderbolt or a trident. Tripoulas sides with Poseidon. Despite an injured leg, the poet has swallowed “a pain pill” and “my pride” (a nice use of the figure of speech known as a zeugma) and made a visit to the museum. Forced to stop and rest, he finds himself “befallen,” the…

GERALD HOWARD is the former executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books. He has worked with writers Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, Debby Applegate, Hanya Yanagihara, Pat Barker, Sean Wilentz, and Bill Bryson, among many others, and is a recipient of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming biography, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, to be published by Penguin Press in November. No American novel of consequence has had a more tortuous or mythologized path to publication than On the Road. Jack Kerouac supposedly composed it in a days-long bout of frenzied typing, feeding a continuous scroll of paper into his typewriter to avoid breaking the flow of inspiration.…

In his 2005 book, Democracy Matters, Cornel West calls James Baldwin “this black American Socrates.” I've always liked this description of Baldwin. He was a man, after all, who—like Socrates—implored us to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that it hides.” But there are also ways in which the comparison fails. Socrates, at least as he is presented to us by Plato, seems almost superhuman. He can drink all night with his interlocutors, and when the whole lot of them are passed out or gone away, he can walk off, seemingly unfazed. When the incredibly gorgeous and hungry Alcibiades tries to seduce him, Socrates has the iron will to resist. Whatever the truth of these stories, they describe a Socrates who does not fit well…

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Meyer v. Nebraska, which considered a law that banned all non–English-language instruction in public schools prior to eighth grade. In a seven-to-two ruling, the Court struck the statute down, on the grounds that it violated the right of educators to teach as they saw fit. Although the case touched on hot-button topics like immigration, almost no one remembers Meyer today. In contrast, consider a case that arose two years later and hinged on the same issue—the pedagogical freedom of public school teachers. Despite never reaching the Supreme Court, this case became the subject of worldwide fascination. Even today, it's probably the most famous nonfederal case in American history. And as Alexander and Harold Gouzoules demonstrate in The Hundred Years' Trial,…

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 LEAR: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? [Lear strikes him.] OSWALD: I'll not be strucken, my lord. KENT [tripping him]: Nor tripped neither, you base football player? —William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene iv My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain. … I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing—I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm—I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful. That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt's portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.…

The monster cats are still down there. In late 2021, repair work on the dam in Lawrence, Kansas, forced Bowersock Hydropower to drain part of the Kansas River to its bed, exposing deep scour holes and the enormous catfish that were nesting in them. For a few days, the company's Instagram page was full of catfish relocation photos: gloved, gumbooted pairs of people carrying massive flatheads and blue cats overland like furniture and depositing them downstream. The following spring, a new round of photos showcased the open-ended culverts that were being installed to replicate the big cats' habitat. “We hope this helps maintain the legendary status of Abe and Jake's honey hole,” one caption announced. In Lawrence, Abe Burns and Jake Washington need no introduction, although they haven't been seen…

Last summer, I flew to Greece to see a production of The Bacchae at the Epidaurus Festival, two hours south of Athens, in the Peloponnese. I wanted to see what Euripides, the last of the three great playwrights of ancient Greece, could teach me about theater. Which might seem like a lofty ambition. But I also just wanted to get away. Of the 92 plays that Euripides wrote, The Bacchae is one of 19 to have survived. He composed it just before his death in 406 BC. It is one of the few Greek tragedies in which Dionysus, the god of theater, is a character. It is also one of the few that ends with sparagmos, the Greek word for the dismembering of a body onstage. The Bacchae takes place in…

J. MALCOLM GARCIA is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul and the forthcoming Alabama Village. He is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism. Some names in this article have been changed to protect individuals' privacy. An early October morning in Oregon, the damp air tasting of winter. I stood with Bruce Murray, a physician at the Grants Pass Clinic, among small and large tents listing on the ground of an otherwise vacant J Street lot, zipped tight against a stiff, cold breeze. Trash stirred, and the wind carried the odor of mildew from heaps of discarded clothes. The occupants of the tents roused themselves, bumming smokes…

BROOKE KROEGER is a journalist, a professor emerita at New York University, and the author of six books, the latest of which is Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism. Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, The Chicago Daily News broke an ironclad policy to make the American reporter Helen Paull Kirkpatrick its first and only woman correspondent abroad. She was nearly 30 and had been living in London since 1937 after two years in Geneva, circulating with patrician ease among the native and expat upper classes. With two English colleagues, she had cofounded The Whitehall Letter, a successful weekly digest of world affairs with a strong antifascist bent, and on her own wrote two books: one about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the prewar Munich Agreement, the…

IZIDORA ANGEL is a Bulgarian-born writer and literary translator based in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, Astra Magazine, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming translation of She Who Remains by Rene Karabash won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. She is at work on a memoir. My father, Solomon—wild, ambitious, unruly—always joked that my mother, Nedialka—beautiful, brainy, reticent—had “caught the last train” in marrying him at the spinsterhood-circling age of 25. (It was 1979.) My great-aunt Stoyanka, who'd raised my mom after her parents died, was initially charmed by my father because he brought her flowers, which no one had ever done, but soon spotted the telltale crease in his left shoe and the limp that signaled his smaller left…

BRENDAN McKENNEDY's short stories have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, EPOCH, Colorado Review, and PANK. He lives in Busan, South Korea. My mom once had a thing for a parish priest named Father Marius. A flirtation, or a crush, a devotion, I don't know what to call it. I don't know how deep it ran. But I saw it in her, whatever it was. This was in the summer of 1997; I was 10. Mom and Jennifer and I still lived in the little house in Rosslyn, just across the Key Bridge from Georgetown. Father Marius had come for dinner. He sat at the head of the table. His beige tweed jacket and striped tie looked like a disguise—I'd never seen a priest out of his customary…

Think twice before learning too much about your literary heroes. That is the lesson of Lance Richardson's engrossing life of Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014), the globetrotting, Zen-minded author of such modern classics as The Snow Leopard (1978) and Shadow Country (2008). The biography shelf of great male writers of the 20th century is hardly a field of glory—rarely does ego yield to humility or self-awareness win the day. Matthiessen may have seemed like a special case, revered as much for his mystical ethos and wayfaring spirit as for his books. Yet this adventure-cool iconography is hard to sustain in the face of a long-suffering wife who called herself a “handmaiden” to Matthiessen's work or a son who described him as “the most self-centered man I've ever known.” Not since Patrick French's…

At Radcliffe College, Gertrude Stein once wrote to her favorite professor, William James: “I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” “Dear Miss Stein,” James wrote back, “I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself,” and gave her the top grade. Calm effrontery always was her game. Buoyed by family money, Stein headed to France in 1903 to live with her older brother Leo. Leo planned to buy Cézannes; 15 or 16 would do. Gertrude, meanwhile, was a medical school dropout who craved verbal revolution. Six days a week, in a sumptuous apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, her Blickensderfer typewriter turned language into confetti with questions straight out of a Lewis Carroll text (“Why is…

We painters enjoy schmoozing about pigments and can have strong opinions about them. Perhaps writers like to discuss favorite typefaces or pens, and I've heard cooks get all excited about certain pots or knives they love. Piet Mondrian, who came to the United States in 1940 to escape the war in Europe, was told to leave New York City to get a sense of what this country was really about. His friends put him on a train to Connecticut for a long weekend and were surprised to see him back in the city within hours. “Too green” was all he said. For painters, green is a tricky color, even if you don't, like Mondrian, work mainly in primary colors. Some colors are bullies: squeeze out overpowering pigments like phthalo green…

To become an expert in your field, you have to take the worst possible outcome in your profession and imagine it as inevitable; indeed, imagine it to have already occurred. If you do that, the fear of such an outcome can no longer touch you. Your mind remains clear and nimble. I am an anesthesiologist, and I learned this lesson one day when assigned to care for a very overweight seven-year-old boy needing a tonsillectomy. I hadn't taken care of a child in months, and I was unusually nervous. The physiology of children differs from that of adults. The heart rates of very young children are faster. Children turn blue more quickly. Special attention must be paid to drug dosages and the size of breathing tubes. In the holding area,…

KRISTIN IDASZAK is an essayist and a multidisciplinary theater artist. A two-time Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellow, she has received the Kennedy Center Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. She has taught at DePaul and North-western universities and was a visiting scholar at FLAME University in Pune, India. Shortly after takeoff, the pilot announced that we were flying into the hurricane and should prepare for a bumpy ride. His tremulous voice did not inspire confidence. I fished in my pocket, closing my fingers around the Klonopin nestled there for my first flight after a life-threatening cardiac episode five weeks before. Simply sitting on the tarmac in Chicago had made my heart skitter and adrenaline flow, despite the presence of my partner beside me. My electrophysiologist had…

KARL KIRCHWEY is professor of English and creative writing at Boston University. His memoir Who Rides the Flame: A Family History of Wartime Loss will be published in 2027. I How long does it take the fountain of blood from a decapitated human body to slow and then stop at an altitude of 28,000 feet, where the temperature is 40 degrees below zero? My father, who thought of becoming a physician but never did, learned the answer to this question. It was collateral learning. He completed 21 missions during World War II as a voice intercept operator, flying on U.S. Army Eighth Air Force bombers out of the county of Norfolk in England. My son, who is an emergency room physician, told me that he had never seen such a…

DENNIS DRABELLE is the author, most recently, of The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks. One hundred years ago, two illustrious cinematic careers had their inceptions when Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks made their directorial debuts. I can't think of a better way to celebrate that shared centennial than by focusing on another year, 1959, in which each delivered a box-office hit that epitomized his artistic preoccupations. For Hitchcock, it was North by Northwest, a wrong-man thriller that chases its protagonist, Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), from Manhattan to Chicago and ultimately to South Dakota. For Hawks, it was Rio Bravo, a Western starring John Wayne as a sheriff who meets a challenge to law and order by collaborating with trusted allies, notably…

The year 2025 marks the 150th birthday of the enigmatic poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and next year will be the 100th anniversary of his death at age 51. A century should be enough time to evaluate his life and literary heritage with some clarity. But it's not. Attempts to assemble a coherent story always seem to bring contradictions to light. Rilke is universally acknowledged to be one of the supreme writers in German, yet the Prague native was deeply conflicted about Germanic language and culture, and alternately showed preferences for French, Italian, Russian, Czech, and Danish. One language that did not hold any attraction for him at all was English, but he is revered in the English-speaking world for reasons that are not entirely clear. Even the finest English translations…

God himself, David tells us in the Psalms of the Old Testament, made humans “a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.” Today, after nearly 2,000 years of science, many thinkers still insist that our species reigns supreme. “Although we are animals,” writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “we are not just animals.” We are better than other creatures, he stated in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. His assertion that humans, alone, “inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature,” echoes millennia of received wisdom. The idea that humans are uniquely intelligent, powerful, and important is such a cultural given in Western philosophy, religion, and science that few of us bother to question it. From Darwin's…

David Nasaw's book is a welcome addition to the history of the generation of Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II. As Nasaw makes clear, many in uniform—whether they saw combat or not—brought home from their military service a variety of pathologies (including substance abuse and “battle fatigue,” now known as PTSD) that strained their relationships with spouses and children and consigned veterans to lasting social and emotional instability. The wholesome narrative that has attached itself to that generation in recent decades is a distortion, and Nasaw's book offers an important corrective. And yet, his work is painfully dated—not because it focuses on the social disruptions consequent to a war that ended 80 years ago, but because it has all the markings of scholarship that grew…