The American Scholar
type: channel
description: A lively forum about literature, the arts and sciences, history, society, politics, and public affairs.
date: 2026-05-14T01:53:18Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: The Final Word
items: Wonderful Life
items: “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks
items: Night Shade
items: ‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’
items: Who Is Thinking?
items: The List
items: “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning
items: Kati Gegenheimer
items: Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing
items: Spreading the Good Word
items: Where Is Wilken?
items: “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon
items: The People’s Critic
items: What He Stood For

The Final Word
type: item
creator: Amy Butcher
date: 2026-05-14T04:05:11Z
subject: Articles
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Spring 2026
description: The death of Gabby Petito and the uncomfortable intimacy of vocal re-creation software The post The Final Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: In April 2022, one month after my 35th birthday, I was raped. My aggressor did not accost me in an alley; he didn’t slip Rohypnol in my drink. He enacted that night a form of sexual violence so intimate, so egregious, so utterly common that until just a few decades ago, marriage rendered it legally invisible. Before the attack, I was a writer. I don’t know what I became the morning after. Prior to my rape, I’d published two books and several dozen essays and won numerous awards. My books had appeared in bookstore windows; my opinion pieces were discussed on podcasts produced by NPR and The New York Times. I’d built a fulfilling career for myself as a professor, and once, while traveling with my students to Northern Ireland to explore the role of personal narrative in conflict resolution (How do you forgive a man, a country, for blowing up your life? Your wife? Your community? Your home? Your body?), I’d placed an order for 10 baskets of fish and chips for my class and then excused myself to take a phone call for a live on-air interview with a sociologist and the BBC. In the days before my assault, I suppose is what I mean, I had been productive, with much to say. Beginning the morning after, I wouldn’t write anything for three whole years. That evening began in my bedroom. You know how this story goes. In some ways, it doesn’t even matter what happened next—not often in the eyes of the law, much less the eyes of most of America. Because I had had sex with him before. Because I had willingly invited him into my bedroom. Because there was no point in calling it a crime if it was an act I had performed willingly several times prior. I said no; he took me anyway. In the aftermath, I lost myself, my voice. What good are words from women when so many men choose not to listen? And when the law—more often than not—tells those men they have that right? In the days and weeks that followed, I began to perform a sort of linguistic gymnastics, using codified phrases like “consen…

Wonderful Life
type: item
creator: Clellan Coe
date: 2026-05-13T04:01:04Z
subject: Asturias Days
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
description: The post Wonderful Life appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: I knew the song playing on the radio, but that didn’t mean I remembered the name, or could figure it out, especially since I’d caught only one line of the chorus. I was on my way from La Pola to Valladolid for a footrace, listening to KISS-FM, which in Spain, as in the United States, plays ’80s and ’90s hits. I recognized most of the songs, but this one I would go crazy trying to place. So I Shazammed it. Shazam will identify a song in seconds, giving the exact title and performer. Tap the icon, and like magic, the uncertainty vanishes. One day we might be able to Shazam our own thoughts to clarify them quickly, but for now, the app records a snippet of music and compares it to … everything in its archive. It works remarkably well. This is what your brain does as well, only with a smaller backlog and a longer processing time. In a grocery store in Houston, Texas, way back in the early 2000s, I heard a song playing that I knew somehow but couldn’t pin down. I didn’t know the artist or the title, or even where I’d heard it before, and the frustration quickly ate into my pleasure at recognizing it. In the grocery store, all my emotion was concentrated on one question. I was pure focus and determination, trying to delve deeply enough into the multiple layers of my accumulating life to release the memory. Would it come slowly bubbling up to the surface? Or would it burst out, almost with a life of its own? Maybe neither, because after two whole minutes of gritting my teeth in concentration, I had nothing. I found an employee stocking shelves in the next aisle. “Excuse me,” I said, and he paused over his stack of cornflakes boxes and looked up inquiringly. “That song that’s playing, what is it?” His expression changed. Already his brain was working. “Could be Coldplay,” he said, naming a band. The name meant almost nothing to me. “What’s the name of the song?” He concentrated. The music was already dying away. “I’m not sure,” he said. Then after the last notes, “No, I don…

“The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks
type: item
creator: Amanda Holmes
date: 2026-05-12T04:01:16Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Read Me a Poem
subject: Spotlight
description: Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: Amanda Holmes reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Boy Died in My Alley.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on The American Scholar.

Night Shade
type: item
creator: Diane Cole
date: 2026-05-11T04:02:03Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Spring 2026
subject: Tuning Up
description: After my husband died, why did he continue to haunt my dreams? The post Night Shade appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: The dreams began in the last weeks of December 1999, soon after my husband, Peter, died at the age of 49. The plotlines were always similar. I would be working in the kitchen, tidying up the apartment, or staring at my computer screen when the front door clicked and Peter would be home, not dead at all, but alive and whole. In these visitations, he was my dream husband, my ghost husband—but never was he my dead husband. Was seeing him this way, even in a dream, the fulfillment of an unconscious wish or the denial of reality? Only gradually was I able to discern the answer. The first few times, Peter’s phantom presence would sweep me away by sweeping away grief itself. He would greet me as he always did, in a manner that my dream self considered perfectly ordinary. Rather than jump out of my skin, as I tend to do at any sudden interruption, I would remain composed at his approach, reassured and calm as his beard grazed my cheek with loving familiarity. Clearly, something odd was going on here. Yet in my muddled state of blissful disorientation, all I could say was, “But you’re dead.” “Am I?” he’d shrug in response. The reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, he contended. (He always had favored Mark Twain’s quips.) He only appeared to have disappeared from the land of the living. And now he was back—from the dead, so to speak, even though he never really was dead. In daylight, my logical, Freud-savvy mind would attempt to interpret his words. Why was he suggesting that he wasn’t really dead? Was he inhabiting this world or another? Why were his words always the same? In my dreams, of course, reason did not prevail. At least not at first. All I knew was that his presence was palpable and that in his ghostly embrace, he was with me—and I with him—still. When the alarm clock rang, I’d find myself alone in my bed, looking forward to nightfall, when the next visitation would comfort me. Part of this comfort derived from the fact that my dreamscape had brought P…

‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’
type: item
creator: Adam Hochschild
date: 2026-05-08T04:06:13Z
subject: Articles
subject: Available Online
subject: Homepage Current Issue
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Spring 2026
description: Historians in the Ukrainian city of Lviv are documenting the horrors of the past while living in the shadow of war The post ‘In the Presence of People No Longer Here’ appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: The city is an architectural gem, almost a stage set. Unlike much of Europe, it suffered no major damage during either world war. Proud rows of 19th-century buildings line cobblestone streets that wind through low hills, past leafy parks and dozens of sidewalk cafés. Modern apartment blocks ring its outskirts, but most of the city looks much as it did when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The walls of a restaurant near City Hall are hung with dozens of brilliant caricatures—profiles captured in a few skillful strokes: a pot belly, an oversize cigar, a long beard, a fastidious hand poised on a tabletop, a preposterously upturned mustache. The subjects were all members of the provincial legislature, which in the last decades of Habsburg rule met here in an august chamber that is now a university auditorium. On the dial of a tall iron radiator in a downtown office building, the writing is in German. A grand opera house is topped with winged statues, and an array of churches and cathedrals—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian, and Orthodox—still look much as they did when listed in an 1887 Baedeker guidebook. So does the palatial railway station that, for many travelers , was once a departure point for the long journey to Ellis Island. On the heights of these buildings is a wondrous galaxy of turrets, spires, gargoyles, and finials. Below them are wrought-iron balconies, from which one imagines men in top hats and women with parasols looking down through pince-nez or lorgnette at plumed lancers on parade. At the four corners of City Hall (1835) are fountains (1793) with statues of mythological figures like Adonis and Neptune. They serve as rendezvous points: “I’ll meet you at Neptune at five o’clock.” But today Neptune and his companions are boarded up, the cathedrals have sheet metal over their stained glass, and the ground-floor windows of City Hall are sandbagged. For this is Lviv, in western Ukraine. Although an occasional building is scarred by a dro…

Who Is Thinking?
type: item
creator: T. M. Luhrmann
date: 2026-05-07T04:07:38Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Book Reviews
subject: Homepage Current Issue
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Spring 2026
description: The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question The post Who Is Thinking? appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan; Penguin Press, 320 pp., $32 In 1998, philosopher David Chalmers made a bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch about whether, in the next 25 years, any scientist would be able to offer a persuasive and precise explanation for how our messy, spongy brains give rise to the feeling of awareness. Koch wagered that the puzzle could be solved. Four years earlier, Chalmers was a somewhat disheveled postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. He sent an abstract to the first Science of Consciousness meeting, hoping simply to present his research on a conference poster. Instead, he found himself on the main stage, where he delivered a characterization of the problem of studying consciousness that, even today, remains central to the field—namely, that there are many relatively easy problems to solve (how things like perception, cognition, and decision-making work, neuroscientifically), and one “hard problem”: determining why any of those electrical, neural, and molecular stories should lead to what it feels like to be you. In his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan walks us through the current state of the debate. Pollan is one of our finest science writers and, to judge by this book, a lovely person with deep curiosities and patience and openness. He tells us that he backed into the topic slowly and unexpectedly. He recalls how he once took a dose of magic mushrooms, sat in his garden, and felt that his plants were talking to him. He couldn’t get the experience out of his mind, and now, after literary forays into what exactly was going on with those mushrooms (How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants), he has turned his attention to the grand, deep puzzle of how to make sense of consciousness itself. What follows is a series of curated Platonic dialogues, with Pollan playing Socrates, the wise fool, posing questions to current experts until they both …

The List
type: item
creator: Clellan Coe
date: 2026-05-06T04:01:52Z
subject: Asturias Days
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
description: The post The List appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: The morning was still fresh, but my to-do list was burning a hole in my pocket. “Where to start?” I asked myself, and then picked a place, took up my tools, and got going, as tough and determined as any miner or lineman, rancher or cabinet builder. “This is exciting,” I thought to myself. And I thought it again, in one variation or another—satisfying, rewarding, gratifying—as the morning unrolled, items scratched off the list, new ones appearing almost as fast. I lost track of time, and the hours flew by. Pausing between emptying the recycling and making rice, I asked myself, “Who says work can’t be thrilling?” After a quick bite for lunch and checking one last item from the list, I was ready to leave for work. “Goodbye,” I told my son. In a spasm of happiness, one foot out the door, I turned again. “Life is so fun,” I said. He stared at me, then asked, “Why?” “Why indeed,” I thought. All I had done that morning was answer a few emails, hang the wash up to dry, make a meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, prepare rice to go with the assortment, wipe down some splashes of coffee on the white kitchen cabinet doors, and in the midst of all this activity, plan where to fit in the other 10 or 15 tasks of my day. What could be so very good about any of those activities? That was my question on my half-hour drive to work, along the motorway and into the city through light traffic and the 16 stoplights that keep drivers in check. We were like horses out of the chute at each signal. This, too, was fun. It really was. But later, in a more controlled moment, I realized it wasn’t a collection of enjoyable moments that made the day exciting; rather it was the growing excitement of fitting everything into the day that made each moment a thrill. On that particular day, my recipe was how to make a hearty dish of the leftover tasks. First, empty the compost bin into the garden. Second, do the recycling. Third, the shopping. Like steps in a recipe, no single step afforded much sat…

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning
type: item
creator: Amanda Holmes
date: 2026-05-05T04:01:51Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Read Me a Poem
subject: Spotlight
description: Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: Amanda Holmes reads Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.

Kati Gegenheimer
type: item
creator: Noelani Kirschner
date: 2026-05-04T04:01:35Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Content
subject: Newsreel
subject: Portrait of the Artist
subject: Spotlight
description: The importance of being “painfully earnest” The post Kati Gegenheimer appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: Painter Kati Gegenheimer doesn’t shy away from the heartfelt or “cringe.” In fact, “that’s exactly where I often hope to land,” she says, “making work that is about love and care, and using energy to sustain those things, even when it seems out of fashion.” Gegenheimer, who studied painting and printmaking at Yale, initially wanted to be a journalist, but her fascination with bright hues and various visual media led her to art instead. “My impulse to record feels really close to what I do now in painting, just a different form,” she says. “I was always trying to find [formats that] … hold information, to hold memory, to keep records, and to then be able to look back, understand, and reflect.” Her works, saturated with vibrant colors, are meant to evoke childhood memories, joy, or other strong reactions. Gegenheimer is constantly pushing herself to play with new, bold pigments—she even painted her first studio a “mermaid teal,” both to resist succumbing to the standard “white cube” gallery space, and to challenge herself to create paintings that would stand out against their surroundings. Now, her first solo museum exhibition, We’ve Only Just Begun, is on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exploring snapshots in time and new beginnings through riotous, colorful paintings hanging on (and in some cases painted directly onto) the walls. Installation view of Kati Gegenheimer: We’ve Only Just Begun, on view at the Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, April 12 through December 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Photography by Constance Mensh.) Lighting in a Box (Hope Chest), 2025-2026, oil on shaped panel, 26 ¼ x 47 ¾ inches. (Courtesy of the Artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Photography by Constance Mensh.) Installation view of Kati Gegenheimer: We’ve Only Just Begun, on view at the Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, April 12 through December 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Artist an…

Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing
type: item
creator: Stephanie Bastek
date: 2026-05-01T04:01:02Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Smarty Pants Podcast
subject: Spotlight
description: Kate Davis gives advice on secondhand scores The post Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma’s treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a popular weekly newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing, that not only spotlights upcoming sales of note but offers a guide for the uninitiated. Her new book, Bring Cash, distills those lessons (the first one is in the title) along with essays about favorite finds and what to look for: dovetail joints in furniture, finished seams in clothing, the sign-in sheet at the front of the line so you’re not the last one admitted into the designer’s midcentury bungalow. Davis joins the podcast this week to talk about what she’s learned from estate sailing, her term for the ritual of trekking out to someone’s house and wandering its halls for treasure—which is almost always sure to include at least one inexplicable maritime tchotchke. Go beyond the episode: Kate Davis’s Bring Cash: A Guide to Estate Sales in the Midwest and Beyond Her newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing For more on the afterlives of secondhand stuff, listen to our interviews with Adam Minter (on global thrifting) and Dana Thomas (on fast fashion) Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! The post Learn the Ropes of Est…

Spreading the Good Word
type: item
creator: Kevin Fenton
date: 2026-04-30T04:02:54Z
subject: Articles
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Spring 2026
description: Wilfrid Sheed’s essays pulsed with the energy of midcentury America The post Spreading the Good Word appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. I aspired to be a writer. The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing an oppressive shop teacher, excerpted from poet Stanley Kiesel’s contribution, give a sense of the tone: “Pop could see—plain as pliers— / poems swimming in my fingers.” The collection included some excellent poets, but it lived and died by the heartfelt declarative sentence. Even the local humor—think A Prairie Home Companion—was about as edgy as a quilt. Without knowing exactly why, I was unhappy with the literary culture that the anthology represented and yearned for something else. Then, in 1978, I discovered Wilfrid Sheed. In an appreciative Rolling Stone review of the novel Transatlantic Blues, Greil Marcus wrote of Sheed that it must be frustrating to be the best book critic in America while having your novels dismissed as brilliant but minor. Wait, what? I’d never heard of Sheed before reading Marcus’s review. Now, in my adolescent way, I wanted to know everything about him. Born in London in 1930, raised in England and the United States, and educated at Oxford, Sheed had published numerous works of fiction and criticism. I sensed that such a critic might point me toward what was lacking in my reading life, which had been limited to the American classics. Fortunately, Northern Lights Books, the new independent bookstore downtown, had a copy of The Good Word and Other Words, a recently published collection of Sheed’s essays. The title referred to the monthly column he wrote for The New York Times Book Review in the early ’70s. This was one of the most prestigious plat…

Where Is Wilken?
type: item
creator: Clellan Coe
date: 2026-04-29T04:01:20Z
subject: Asturias Days
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
description: The post Where Is Wilken? appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: “It was Wicas,” my son told me. “Or something similar.” We were sitting at a café terrace, waiting for our coffee, and I had just remarked that I ought to stop at the house where the old yellow dog had lived and ask the owner his name. It had been less than a week since I’d walked by one morning and discovered that the dog wasn’t there. The chain was missing from the ring in the cement by the doghouse. Sad, I’d thought, walking on. Sad, but considering how sometimes the dog barely had the strength to stand, not surprising. The first person—the only person—I’d told about the dog’s demise was my son. Both of us had felt sorry for the dog and made a point of stopping to pet him whenever we walked by his home. “Wicas.” I repeated. “You asked the owner?” My son said yes, one day when the owner happened to be outside. Wicas was what he remembered. Wicas sounds like whiskers, I thought. I shouldn’t forget. I wondered aloud if the word meant anything in Spanish. My son didn’t think so. The café was on a corner two blocks from our home, across the street from the high school. We were under the awning, though the day was cloudy, with neither rain nor sun to shelter from. Our German shepherd Toby was under the table, looking his usual mournful self. Once confident and assertive, he was now timid, meek. When the waitress arrived with our coffees, she cooed at him, as you would a baby, but Toby hardly looked up until she asked if she could give him a treat. Sure, we answered, and she produced a small dog biscuit about the size of a penny, and let him take it from her fingers. Then she offered another, cooing the whole time. Wicas, if that was really his name, had lived his life on an eight-foot chain. He could have used some of this gentle attention. Now that he was gone, the occasional three minutes I’d spent rubbing his head and back seemed piddling. I sighed. The waitress ran her hand over Toby’s head. She asked his name, and we told her. “Good Toby,” she said with a final pa…

“Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon
type: item
creator: Amanda Holmes
date: 2026-04-28T04:01:29Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Read Me a Poem
subject: Spotlight
description: Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: Amanda Holmes reads Jane Kenyon’s “Twilight: After Haying.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.

The People’s Critic
type: item
creator: Joseph Horowitz
date: 2026-04-27T04:05:46Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
description: Michael Steinberg’s profound insights on music transcended the ephemeral world of daily newspaper journalism The post The People’s Critic appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964–1976 edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel; Oxford University Press, 648 pp., $34.97 New York City at the close of the 19th century thrilled to an early heyday in the erratic history of American classical music. The presiding conductor, Anton Seidl, was a charismatic protégé of Richard Wagner. More than leading American premieres of five Wagner operas at the Metropolitan (and espousing performances of the composer in English), he ultimately presided over a nationwide Wagnerism movement: an arts wildfire. Conducting the New York Philharmonic, he premiered the New World Symphony of Antonín Dvořák, with whom he met daily at Fleischman’s Cafe near Union Square. As director of the National Conservatory of Music, Dvořák in 1893 prophesied that “Negro melodies” would anchor a “great and noble school” of American music. His Black assistant Harry Burleigh would play a pivotal role in turning spirituals into art songs. Seidl, meanwhile, led American Composers’ Concerts. The creation of an American concert idiom, of an American canon, was the presiding priority. The culture of performance that came after World War I, hypnotized by foreign-born conductors and virtuosos, would be a sharp departure. The same fin-de-siècle moment marked the apex of American musical journalism. The big three critics—Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune, W. J. Henderson of The New York Times, and James Gibbon Huneker, who mainly wrote for the Sun—were a study in contrasts. Krehbiel was an impassioned Germanic windbag who preached art as uplift. Henderson’s prose was atypically lean; his specialty was vocal art. Huneker was a virtuoso stylist (H. L. Mencken was a disciple) heralding the coming modernist moment. What they had in common was community—with one another, and with the artists whose activities they observed, adjudicated, and shared. Huneker’s responsibilities included doing publicity for the National Conservato…

What He Stood For
type: item
creator: Jonathan Coleman
date: 2026-04-24T04:03:09Z
subject: Available Online
subject: Newsreel
subject: Spotlight
subject: Web Essays
description: How Angus Cameron, one of the most significant editors in the history of American publishing, responded to being targeted by the McCarthy blacklist The post What He Stood For appeared first on The American Scholar.
encoded: I In December 1998, with talk of impeachment disrupting the apricity of a Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., there was (as the Irish like to say) a wonderful commotion taking place at the Cosmos Club near Dupont Circle. Publishers had shuttled in from New York or Boston or come down on the Metroliner. Democratic socialists from the 1940s and 1950s had come, too (along with a smattering of radicals and red-diaper babies), remarking that the witch-hunt atmosphere of Kenneth Starr’s Washington was not unlike that of the McCarthy period years earlier. Fly fishermen had put down their rods and taken off their waders and drifted in from Montana; salmon fishermen had parted company for the moment from the banks of the Restigouche and the Miramichi; hunters had emerged from the Adirondacks full of tall tales; birders temporarily abandoned their binoculars and migrated from near and far. All manner of chefs were there, gourmands, meat-and-potatoes guys, a few westerners with Stetsons, science buffs, historians of various stripes, writers with only one book in them, colorful con men a mere city block ahead of the law, a Scot with a kilt but, alas, without his bagpipes, and a former foreign correspondent who stepped right out of a Graham Greene novel. They, this whole rich stew of generations that formed pieces of a life, had all come to this august establishment on Massachusetts Avenue for Angus Cameron’s 90th birthday party, and they would hear, among other things, a letter from Gore Vidal, faxed from Italy. “Although I cannot say much good about the century Angus Cameron has lived through,” Vidal wrote in his legendarily dyspeptic way, “I have regarded him as a singularly bright paladin, or dare I use the phrase, wise centurion.” I had come to Washington that day, along with my five-year-old daughter, and as I sat there, staring across the room at Angus, at the father I might have chosen had I had a choice, it was not hard, even after all the years, to recall my first me…