About Us

elliesilho
Find out what other great minds like yours are thinking …

The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won five National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and been nominated for those awards 24 times. Many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

In 2006, The American Scholar began to publish fiction by such writers as Ann Beattie, Louis Begley, David Guterson, David Leavitt, Dennis McFarland, Steven Millhauser, and Alice Munro. Essays, articles, criticism, and poetry have been mainstays of the magazine for 75 years.

Ralph Waldo EmersonInspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, “The American Scholar,” delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1837, the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.

 

Among the writers who have appeared in the pages of The American Scholar are:

Natalie Angier
Hannah Arendt
Nicholson Baker
Jacques Barzun
Saul Bellow
Sven Birkerts
Henry Steele Commager
Aaron Copland
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
Rita Dove
William O. Douglas
W.E.B. DuBois
Freeman Dyson
Gretel Ehrlich
Albert Einstein
Ralph Ellison
Erik H. Erikson
Anne Fadiman
Frances FitzGerald
Mary Gordon
Anthony Grafton
Stephen Jay Gould

Allan Gurganus
Shirley Hazzard
John Hersey
Edward Hoagland
Aldous Huxley
Joseph Epstein
Randall Jarrell
Philip Larkin
Bernard Lewis
David Levering Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Walter Lippmann
Alison Lurie
James McConkey
Marshall McLuhan
Thomas Mallon
Thomas Mann
Margaret Mead
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Reinhold Niebuhr
Cynthia Ozick
George Plimpton
Marilynne Robinson

Richard Rodriguez
Richard Rorty
Phyllis Rose
Ingrid D. Rowland
Muriel Rukeyser
Bertrand Russell
Oliver Sacks
Carl Sagan
Simon Schama
Shelby Steele
Hampton Sides
Barbara Tuchman
John Updike
Helen Vendler
Alice Walker
John Edgar Wideman
Ted Widmer
Garry Wills
Edmund Wilson
Edward O. Wilson
C. Vann Woodward
Charles Wright
William Zinsser