“It was a beautifully clear evening, and we had a most enchanting view of the two magnificent ranges of mountains, whose lofty peaks, perfectly covered with eternal snow, rose to elevations varying from seven to ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.” In January of 1841, British explorer
Eugene O’Neill has oft been regarded as the greatest American playwright. Born in New York City in 1888, O’Neill’s dark and haunted personality, the least of which was a symptom of his depression, made him a notorious creator of fearless drama. Unafraid to confront societal themes that were popularly regarded
At first glance, being a sixteenth-century lord doesn’t sound half bad—live in a castle, commission vast paintings and sculptures, and occasionally cast a vote to elect a Holy Roman Emperor. Easy, right? Wrong. In The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation, historian Steven Ozment
The friendships that formed the conversations of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex ideas of the relationships between art and race were the vein of black literary life of the early twentieth century. As editor of the volume of letters, Remember Me to Harlem: The Correspondence of Langston Hughes and
What does it mean to be a prophet? In his new biography Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, Donald Weinstein gives us one answer to this question, tracing the story of religious visionary Girolamo Savonarola from his early loss of faith in society to his later attempts
If you missed the debut of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show this weekend, the network makes most of the episode available online. In her inaugural episode, Harris-Perry covers Mitt Romney and campaign psychology for candidates—including “Daddy Issues”, the GOP progress with Southern voters, union memberships and the middle class, women on
The people portrayed in Lucian Freud’s portraits are not passive, flawless models, stuck in the imagined world of a framed canvas. They have lived—endured—with evidence of years past in their rough, wrinkled, worn, and scarred skin. Like his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud explores his subjects’ inner troubles and
This month, the blog “Forces of Geek” is giving away four copies of Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, a must-read for the cartoon aficionado. Using hand-drawn illustration accompanied by witty text, Brunetti guides the reader through the theory and terminology of cartooning and offers a series of easy lessons
Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel. Yet, in Ralph Ellison In Progress: From
Come Friday night, most college students put down their books and put on their favorite jeans before heading out to parties where hip-hop music blares in crowded clubs and living rooms—Kanye or Lil Wayne’s rhymes making it necessary to shout in order to be heard. The next day, the more