From among his few short stories, William Austin’s fame rests primarily with one, “Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man,” which became immensely popular and a favorite of Hawthorne and Longfellow. Austin incorporates legends of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman into a New England setting, much as [[Washington Irving]] had done with Knickerbocker materials […]
Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple. “History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to […]
The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin: The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and […]
The first edition of Robert Frost’s third collection of poems, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916 by Henry Holt and Company and was dedicated “To you who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, the Upper at Plymouth, where we walked in spring beyond […]