The Challenge of Casanova
September 22, 2023
Leo Damrosch— Everyone knows that Casanova was a seducer. He belongs to that rare company of mortals whose personal names have floated free from history, and we know what a… READ MORE
Category: Biography
In Other Lives
September 13, 2023
Greil Marcus— “I can see myself in others,” Bob Dylan said in Rome in 2001, speaking to a crowd of journalists, and if there is a key to his work… READ MORE
Ep. 119—The World’s First Media Celebrity
August 29, 2023
Acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden talks with us about her new biography, Vergil: The Poet’s Life. In this volume of the Ancient Lives Series, Ruden uses evidence from Roman life and… READ MORE
Metamorphoses of a Figure
August 2, 2023
John Noël Dillon— All consideration of history presumes a point of view rooted in the present, and this “point of observation” can change over the course of someone’s life. The… READ MORE
Into the World’s Greatest Heart
May 10, 2023
Timothy F. Jackson— Introduction These letters represent Edna St. Vincent Millay’s written correspondence from 1900, when she was eight, until 1950, the last year of her life. Readers of these… READ MORE
Ep. 110 — Historian of Abolition R. J. M. Blackett on Samuel Ringgold Ward
May 8, 2023
This episode of our podcast features a conversation with historian R.J.M. Blackett about the 19th century newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and temperance advocate Samuel Ringgold Ward. Despite Ward’s prominent role in the… READ MORE
Derby History is Black History
May 5, 2023
Katherine C. Mooney— In the spring of 1955, the new Sports Illustrated made a bold choice and retained William Faulkner to cover the Kentucky Derby. The ’55 Derby turned out… READ MORE
Winter in Paris, 1920
April 13, 2023
Edna St. Vincent Millay— PARIS, 1920 Jan. 29, 1920 Twenty-five days without a decent cup of coffee,—twenty-five days, three hours & forty-six minutes, to be exact,—an honest calculation, too, allowing… READ MORE
“My Dearest James”: Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill
March 15, 2023
Manan Kapoor— Sometime in the 1990s, Agha Shahid Ali wrote a poem about the Bosnian War and sent it to James Merrill, who responded: “There is nothing that you can… READ MORE
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