An unprecedented study that puts mixed-ancestry Native Americans back into the heart of Indigenous history Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry...

The History of Literature's countdown of the greatest books of all time continues! Here's Jacke's list of books 19 to 11, with opening lines that craftily establish…

It's the 750th episode of the History of Literature, and what better way to celebrate than to talk some Hemingway with repeat guest Mark Cirino? In this episode, Ja…

Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart (1959) ushered in a new era where African countries, which had recently achieved post-colonial independence, now achie…

Yale Library Book Talks Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, will speak about his new book "Storyteller: the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific. Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist. In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic. Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius" (National Book Award finalist); "Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova"; "The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age"; and "Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World" (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist).

When Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, pondered the "dread of something after death, / the undiscovered country," he noted that such thoughts "puzzles the will." (Ea…

Although Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote with wildness and urgency, he patiently insisted on asking an essential question: What are we living for?

Gutenberg remains unknowable: an implied but not a felt presence. This is true for all but a small number of 15th-...

When novelist Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, the planet lost one of its most creative and compelling voices. In this episode, Jacke talks to Vonnegut scholar Christina…

Jacke talks to journalist Tom Roston about his new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse Five . PLUS …

What are the qualities of a great book? Jacke considers this question as he creates his list of the 25 greatest books of all time. As a teaser, here are the first …