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.

Frank Freeman reviews "The Mountains of Parnassus" by Czeslaw Milosz.

The central insight of David Walsh’s book is that “the person is transcendence."

'The Fellowship,' by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

I rsquo ve heard it said hurt people hurt If anyone was ever hurt as a child not physically but emotionally it was Tennessee Williams His mother Edwina rsquo s denial did the hurting denial she turned into an art form which her son turned into art And John Lahr senior drama critic of The Ne