In 1962, a young Texas playwright named Horton Foote adapted one of the South’s greatest novels, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Already a prolific playwright in his own right, Foote... Read More

Celebrated American poet W.S. Merwin is notable not only for his accomplishments and prodigious output (publishing twenty-some poetry collections, twenty-some translations, and several books of prose since 1952), but for the shifts in... Read More

Who could have guessed when academic Robert B. Parker introduced Boston private eye Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript in 1974 that the entire landscape of American detective fiction would shift? Although Spenser (last name only, please)... Read More

The novelist David Foster Wallace took his own life on September 12, 2008. This single fact colors virtually everything written about his work since then, a fact acknowledged in this collection of critical essays focusing on Wallace’s... Read More

“Was there any?” was the response of a film historian when Tom Stempel, a professor of cinema, mentioned that he was researching writing in American television. Film and television screenplays usually do not appear on lists of great... Read More

“The critic,” writes Eric Ormsby, “must stimulate curiosity but he or she must also appeal to our innate sense of justice. Like it or not, the critic is a judge…We may flinch from the ‘judgmental’ but at the same time, I... Read More

For every great writer there need to be equally great readers. Jonathan Yardley may be just that, willing not only to read a work once, but also to re-read it seven or eight times. Yardley has been a columnist and book critic for the... Read More

In an article entitled “Muriel Spark’s Definition of Reality” in the journal Critique, Ann B. Dobie states, “The basic intention of Muriel Spark’s novels has not always been clear to critics….” Linette Bruno, an English... Read More