A look back at Thomas Mann's 'Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man' and 'The Magic Mountain' reveals an author perpetually in exile—literally and figuratively.

Neeli Cherkovski's expanded edition of his biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a book by “a poet who set out to celebrate another poet.”

To understand the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe demands close attention to his engagements with scientific thought and discoveries.

Julius Margolin's memoir of his time in the gulag tells his experiences through a shattering series of stories.

In a new biography of Robert Stone, Madison Smartt Bell argues that Stone’s career involves both the American dream and the search for meaning.

He is most well known for inventing the light bulb and the phonograph, but Thomas Edison patented 1,093 "machines, systems, processes, and phenomena.” In 1881, Edmund Morris writes, Edison was “executing, on average, one new patent every four days.”

The fear of deceit was the foundation of Orwell’s work.

Dubus was an irascible, loyal, loving, smoking, hard-drinking, hard-punching, tender man, who demanded much of himself and others.

Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog and a memoir, Townie. A complete collection of his father’s short stories has just been published.

Three recent books on Thoreau, prompted by the the 200th anniversary of his birth, deepen our understanding of him.