Summer 2024

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min read
Night Watch
If you were swept up in solar eclipse mania—as was Jessica Wilde, who writes about her obsession in this issue (“Corona Chasers,” Tuning Up)—then you may have read about the place now dubbed “the total eclipse crossroads of America.” That would be th
The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
SUDIP BOSE Editor BRUCE FALCONER Executive Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Senior Editor JAYNE ROSS Associate Editor ELLIE EBERLEE Assistant Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor SALLY ATWATER Copy E
The American Scholar7 min read
Bards Behind Bars
In my early 20s, having received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, I sought to cobble together a living by teaching. Although I had taught an undergraduate class as part of my fellowship, I hadn’t yet published a book, so the only suc
The American Scholar7 min read
Corona Chasers
In August 2017, my husband, Josh, and I traveled to South Carolina to see a total solar eclipse for the first time. Filled with wonder and awe at the ghostly halo of our sun’s corona, we became eclipse chasers. In 2019, we witnessed this astronomical
The American Scholar5 min read
Riding With Mr. Washington
I was telling a white friend about my great-grandfather, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and college professor who began his career in the 1890s, when her face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Was he married to a white woman?” she asked. Stunned, I stammered, “N
The American Scholar6 min read
Just When You Thought It Wasn't Safe …
In 1921, at the newly opened swimming pool at Washington University, St. Louis, a crowd of 2,500 gathered across two nights to witness America’s first water pageant. A portly man dressed as Father Neptune, with a long gray beard and trident, emerged
The American Scholar6 min read
For Whom Do We Create?
American Fiction is the film I’ve been waiting for since I majored in ’lm studies at Columbia University more than two decades ago. Only 27 minutes into it, I was compelled to stop, not only so that I could contemplate the beauty and complexity of th
The American Scholar19 min read
A Forgotten Turner Classic
JOSHUA PRAGER is the author of three books, most recently The Family Roe, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. A former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, he received a literature award in 2023 from the American Acade
The American Scholar23 min read
Imperfecta
PAMELA HAAG is the author of Marriage Confidential, The Gunning of America, and, most recently, Revise. My older brother Stephen was always tall. Extremely tall. He was that kid who occupied precisely the middle position in the last row of every clas
The American Scholar9 min read
The Next New Thing
WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI’s latest book is The Story of Architecture. I served for a decade on the jury of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, awarded each year to the architect who best represents the values of traditional and classical design. As Martin C. Pede
The American Scholar21 min read
To Catch a Sunset
SANDRA BEASLEY is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, and the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington, D.C. It’s my first full night in Homer, Alaska. I arrived in An
The American Scholar2 min read
Florida Baroque
In her new book of poetry criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Ange Mlinko identifies two contrasting lyric styles: the plain and the ornate, or the Temperate and the Tropical. The poets Mlinko treats in that book, all captivated by
The American Scholar4 min read
Four Poems
Driving south, I cross it—the intangible line beyond which bougainvillea grows, beyond which the land is flagrant. It’s not exact; there is no sign as with a border, so everybody knows. It doesn’t waft to me; it’s not even fragrant. When I see the bu
The American Scholar1 min read
Femmes Fantastiques
For more than two decades, Mickalene Thomas has explored Black femininity through a variety of media: painting, photography, drawing, video, and installation. Arguably her most striking images, however, are her collages—rhinestones, acrylic, paper, a
The American Scholar22 min read
The Given Child
WILLIAM DEBUYS is the author of 10 books, including The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss. He lives in northern New Mexico on a small farm he has tended since the 1970s. Jigme led the girl’s horse to the river’s edge. The girl
The American Scholar18 min read
Martha Foley's Granddaughters
JAY NEUGEBOREN is the author of 23 books. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The New York Times and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His latest nov
The American Scholar12 min read
Rage, Muse
WENDY SMITH is a contributing editor of the Scholar and the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. Greek myths were among my favorite stories when I was little, thanks to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s charmingly illu
The American Scholar21 min read
Up Close
DENNIS McFARLAND’s most recent novel is Nostalgia. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Scholar, among other places. In the last scene of Carla Abdala-Diggs’s musical Federal Agent, set in ctional Ar
The American Scholar4 min read
The Rescuer
Araminta Ross, or “Minty,” was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Catastrophe marked her early life. She was six years old when she was sent away from her mother to work as a weaver; three of her sisters were sold into the De
The American Scholar4 min readAmerican Government
Rhyme, Not Repetition
Five years ago, still struggling to explain Donald Trump’s political success, The New York Times alighted on the 1619 Project, by which one could view Trump’s election as merely one manifestation of the racism that, per the project, has always de˜ned
The American Scholar4 min read
Facing The Facts
In The Missing Thread, alongside the female stars of classical antiquity, like Sappho, Cleopatra, and Boudica, British classicist Daisy Dunn introduces us to a selection of arresting minor fiures: the swimmer who disabled ships during the Persian War
The American Scholar4 min read
Survival Situation
In June 1860, the Oxford Natural History Museum hosted an open plenary session on a new book, The Origin of Species. Two thousand people turned up, a prizefighters’ crowd. The discussion period got seriously out of hand. The aftershocks of that day a
The American Scholar4 min read
We Are The Borg
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectua
The American Scholar3 min read
Numbers Game
In Japan, on a cold day in the winter of 2012, Australian writer Richard Flanagan stood at the entrance of the mine where his father had labored as a POW during the Second World War. He found “no memorial, no sign, no evidence … that whatever had onc
The American Scholar5 min read
Born To Be Wild
One November afternoon, while jogging on the edge of a swamp about two miles from his house in Massachusetts, John Kaag encountered a lone wolf. As he ran frantically homeward, he discovered a rock cave in his own back yard that he had never noticed
The American Scholar4 min read
Uncontacted
Football games at Louisiana State University draw tens of thousands of fans to Tiger Stadium and its environs. A sea of revelers, clad in purple and gold, spills out in all directions, and a first-time visitor—washed along to the tailgating lots nort
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
In my experience the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt. —Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 1954 Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred i
The American Scholar1 min read
Anniversaries
One hundred years ago, the composer Gabriel Fauré died, leaving behind a body of work noted for its elegance and refinement. After training to be a church organist and studying with Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré went on to teach at the Paris Conservator

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