M. D. Aeschliman

Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »

In the course of a very long life, Malcolm Muggeridge made many enemies, but he surely made more friends, among whom it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been included. His enemies could be found both to the left and to the right. Those on the left are easy to account for: by . . . . Continue Reading »

The Culture We Deserve by jacques barzun university press of new england, 185 pages, $19.95 “I have got materials toward a treatise,” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in September 1725, “proving the falsity of that definition of animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis . . . . Continue Reading »

For the advanced writer of our time, Diana Trilling wrote twenty-five years ago in “The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer,” “the self is his supreme, even sole referent.” The specifically American literary history of this immoralism, moral anarchism, or relativization has been remarked or . . . . Continue Reading »