Writers & Poets

History as Parable

History is never merely history.

What You Need to Know About Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what...

What You Need to Know About Henry David Thoreau

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what...

Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place

Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which...

Radical Traditionalists: The Fall of Triumph Magazine

This article first appeared in Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life. In May of 1970, back from the Vietnam War...

The War Comes Home

This Friday, June 28, Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of a Harold Frederic novella, opens in about 70 cities. A second...

On a Sculpture by Herbert Adams

For Adams and his peers the trade of art must have itself seemed an imported thing: threatening, rarified, and set apart like thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing above the folded skin of clouds.

At Bar Harbor Once, And Once . . .

We scrambled up the craterous outcrop that ruptured like an isle in the gray sands spread thin around Cille inne Bay.

The Night of Susurrant Voices

God didn't put twelve months on the calendar so we could work them all.

Gatsby for the Millennials

Berwyn, PA.  I was a little surprised, not too long ago, to hear a student mention that The Great Gatsby was her favorite book.  "Because...