American Life

The fringes of fame, the outer purlieus of power, are always much more interesting than the epicenter

‘My forty-five-year-old self is inhabiting my nine-year-old body’

When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces

The writer has made a literary reputation on his fluid narratives of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Southern history

Is it possible to love a science, or any branch of knowledge, despite one’s abysmal ignorance thereof?

That’s all he played, one single game, and it took him almost a century to get credit for it

Mine are for things undone, unmade, untold. They’re hardly earth-shattering, but still…

Pat Weissend’s interest in US presidents was sparked in his boyhood by little effigies his aunt gave him

Two decades after the camera tycoon entered the last darkroom, Henry Clune published a thinly veiled roman-à-clef about the morose magnate

The late novelist’s wound was more gaping than most

No filmmaker has explored the imaginative appeal of the Civil War in as much depth or from such diverse angles as Ron Maxwell

Prose may be deathless, but authors are not — and some of us honor those who compose with visits to where they decompose

On the first weekend of every August, Angelica hosts a tournament in its village park during ‘Heritage Days’

We couldn’t leave the Electric City without a drive-by of the house in which native son Joe Biden spent his first decade

I have finally encountered an umpire I would despise, disparage, spit upon, kick, and, yes, kill

It wasn’t supposed to be this way

Heaven’s Gate  is a 200-minute-plus mess of beautiful incoherences and stupefying contradictions

Few in our history have ever switched teams with the dramatic flair of Karl Hess

Ketchum today does not exploit the Hemingway connection

We who refuse to spend our days caressing the wretched rectangle are fast being reduced to second-class citizenhood