Wednesday
December 19, 2018
Subscribe
Print or Web publication

Subscribe

 

Subscribe to the print edition of The American Scholar and receive complete digital access for free.

Subscriptions are only $29 a year.

Complete Web Access is only $9.99 a year.

Subscription Renewals


Need to Register?

Already a subscriber but don’t have a password?

OR

Are you a Phi Beta Kappa sustaining member?

 

If you prefer to subscribe by telephone or are having trouble subscribing online, please call (800) 821-4567.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Newsletter

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

A Christmas Feast

by William Zinsser

During a routine cleaning spree, William Zinsser came across a memento from a long-ago Christmas: a dinner menu from 1944, the year he spent the holiday with the 885th Bomb Squadron. “We lived in tents, hunched against the frozen Italian winter, keeping warm with a makeshift stove,” recalls Zinsser. Yet in the midst of the fighting, one man typed up a Christmas dinner menu, styled like those in a fancy restaurant. “Alone of all American holidays, Christmas has been held inviolate,” read a note typed on the back, “[so] men may have a brief respite from the grim business of war to restock their spiritual strength.” For Zinsser, the true nourishment that Christmas came not from the dinner, but from those words.