Robert Roper

Robert Roper is the author most recently of Nabokov in America and The Savage Professor, a novel.

The poet who helped bind up the nation’s wounds

Nabokov's profitable summer chasing butterflies and settling scores in the Utah mountains

A throbbing world of sensation and heartbreak

The posthumous masterwork of an influential black historian tells how slavery itself undermined the Confederacy

A throbbing world of sensation and heartbreak

The Civil War only enhanced George Whitman's soldierly satisfaction; for his brother Walt, however, the horrors halted an outpouring of great poetry