Toni Morrison's fiction conveyed much of the pain, sacrifice and trauma that exemplifies so much of the African-American experience—which is why it makes some white readers uncomfortable.

Sinéad O’Connor's provocative appearance on 'Saturday Night Live' 30 years ago drew cries of outrage. But was some of her anger justified?

Powers’s chosen subjects—in cassocks or nay—are inevitably All-American, and his stories are careful studies of American mid-century life and ambition.

Evelyn Waugh's reputation has endured for almost a century as other novelists have fallen out of fashion. It wasn't because everyone thought him a jolly fellow.

John Irving writes characters who, like Flannery O’Connor’s American South, seem somehow God-haunted.

Shannen Dee Williams’s 'Subversive Habits' uncovers—with authoritative, painstaking scholarship—a great deal of what was hidden and some of what has been erased concerning white supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church.