Autumn 2021

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min read
Critical Thinking
THE OTHER DAY I VISITED the home of a relative with whom, I have learned, the safest subject of conversation is sports. I asked him, in all innocence and naïveté, if he had been watching the Olympics. “You mean the woke Olympics?” he asked, an edge t
The American Scholar11 min read
A Nation Betrayed, A People Forsaken
Dear Mr. Modi: Seven years after your election to the post of prime minister, I write to you, anguished at the state of our country. I do so with some measure of hope that you will realize how a country once respected for its open-door hospitality,
The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar,
ROBERT WILSON Editor SUDIP BOSE Managing Editor BRUCE FALCONER Senior Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Associate Editor JAYNE ROSS Assistant Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director› SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor› SAL
The American Scholar1 min read
Murzban F. Shroff
is the author of Breathless in Bombay, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, and Fasttrack Fiction. He was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and is a six-time Pushcart nominee. His latest book of stories, Third Eye Rising, was published this year
The American Scholar4 min readAmerican Government
Works In Progress
Jenn Emerling is a travel and documentary photographer who spends most of her time on the road, seeking to capture the beauty and idiosyncrasies of the American West. During Emerling’s month as an arts fellow at the nonprofit organization Epicenter,
The American Scholar2 min read
A Shattered Sisterhood
Jamie Floyd is a solo artist and Grammy-nominated songwriter whose work has been performed by Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert, and Kellie Pickler, among others. Mêlisa Annis, originally from Wales, writes for stage, television, and radio and teaches
The American Scholar4 min readChemistry
Creative Destruction
WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT the Spagyricus Institute, also known as the Pacific Northwest School of Alchemy, no sign indicates you have made it. No house number. No sprawling green lawn. Those who attend the Spagyricus Institute, one of the few such schools i
The American Scholar25 min read
On Our Knees
KNEELING HAS REENTERED American political discourse. In the protests after George Floyd’s murder, Black Americans approached police officers and knelt. To lower one’s body in front of a man wearing riot gear and weapons, a man who is vibrating with t
The American Scholar16 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
A Prophet And A President
HE WAS THE ONLY STUDENT of African descent in his competitive high school, a circumstance that might have made him more self-conscious than he was, had it not been for a precociousness that made book learning easy. Even if he had wanted to slide by i
The American Scholar20 min read
The Bird That Sang I Am
1 A few years ago, I edited an anthology of poems called Joy. This fall I’m publishing a new anthology, Home, which I had intended to be a companion book. In many ways it is, but in one major way it’s not. In Joy a long and wide-ranging search led me
The American Scholar2 min read
The Shadowy And The Sensory
FROM THE VALLEY of the shadow in Psalm 23 to the “millions of strange shadows” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53, from Peter Pan to the long-running radio show The Shadow, shadows have suggested metaphors for the sinister and uncanny. For the poet and criti
The American Scholar3 min read
Five Poems
It was the hour of long shadows.Because you were brave, I thoughtto teach you a little—as any mother oughtwho wishes her daughter to knowsomething of the dark that lurkswithin plain sight. “See the shapefollowing you? You cannot escapeit—stepping sid
The American Scholar21 min read
Whatever Happened to Frankie King?
ON A COOL, EARLY SUMMER evening in June 2015, I was at the Friars Club in midtown Manhattan to celebrate my friend Talia Carner’s new novel, Hotel Moscow. I started talking with Talia’s husband, Ron Carner, and we quickly realized that we’d gone to r
The American Scholar17 min read
It’s Come to This
ALL NIGHT, THUNDER. Low mutters rumbling from Minneapolis, like a neighbor’s angry spat through a flimsy wall. This has nothing to do with you, lucky you. Then whole minutes of reassuring quiet—entirely phony, as it turns out. The calm before the … T
The American Scholar18 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
Dark White
ONE WARM EVENING in Berlin, I wandered over to the ice cream shop facing a lively square. “Can I try this one?” I asked in my halting German. The woman behind the counter glared at me. “Dieses hier,” I repeated, pointing. Wordlessly, she handed me a
The American Scholar21 min read
An Essay On The Differences Of The Races
Ambassador Taeko called me into his office, the entire top floor of the Japanese Legation to the League of Nations. The white masonry building, with its attic and mansard roof, was formerly the headquarters of a Dutch trading company, and there were
The American Scholar9 min read
If You Can’t See the Stage, Turn to the Page
WHEN NEW YORK STATE shut down all theaters on March 12, 2020, I held a half-dozen tickets to productions that I soon realized I might never see. I go to the theater at least once a week all year long, and the shock of deprivation was considerable. I
The American Scholar8 min read
At The Corner Of Byron And Shelley
I WAS WALKING DOWN Byron Street one day this past spring, heading to the post office in downtown Athens (an allowable outing under the lockdown—reason #2). It is a pleasant street, with one- and two-story neoclassical buildings in various stages of r
The American Scholar5 min read
Her Pages Caught Fire
BY CATHY CURTIS Norton, 400 pp., $35 “A SHILLING LIFE WILL give you all the facts,” declared W. H. Auden in his sonnet “Who’s Who.” Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick costs more than a shilling, but it is rich in
The American Scholar4 min read
The Capital of Self-Reliance
BY ROBERT A. GROSS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 864 pp. $40 “I HAVE NEVER GOT over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world,” Henry Thoreau told his journal in 1856, “—& in the very nick of time, too.” Th
The American Scholar5 min read
Holding the Reigns
BY MAUREEN QUILLIGAN Liveright, 320 pp., $29.95 MAUREEN QUILLIGAN begins her provocative new book with a tirade: in 1558, the Scottish reformer John Knox published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in which he d
The American Scholar5 min read
Touché-ing the Void
BY PAUL BLOOM Ecco, 304 pp., $27.99 ON THE TITLE PAGE of Paul Bloom’s new book, a thumbnail figure climbs toward the top right corner, pushing an enormous boulder that threatens to crush him. This is Sisyphus, the ancient Greek personification of su
The American Scholar4 min read
Poet Of The Extreme
BY PAUL AUSTER Henry Holt, 800 pp., $35 THE LIFE AND WORK of Stephen Crane derived gravity from brevity. Not one of his novels is much more than a hundred pages long, and they and his short stories strip language to its potent minimum. Crane’s short
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

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