That same summer, McCullers began a whirlwind tour of conferences and residencies, where she charmed some of the most famous names in literature and alienated many others. At Bread Loaf, the summer writers’ conference at Middlebury College, she was an “enfant terrible,” monopolizing the conversation and drinking all of Wallace Stegner’s bourbon—when she wasn’t drinking … Read more
It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did much to hasten the end that they … Read more
What happened in the apple orchard that so frightened the children? Something had been half-glimpsed or heard, something in the night. Rumors sparked but didnât catch. The children kept their distance, and stayed close to the nearby school. Years passed. The school was shut down. The buildings stood. The orchard grew wild. And, one day, … Read more
At Christmas, 1939, a few months into the new World War, London bookshops were very busy. The war was bringing in a public eager to learn about weapons, planes, and the nature of the country that was once again the enemy. Confidence was high and curiosity, as much as fear, prevailed. Among recent titles, “I … Read more
In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on Matters of Theology and Religion.” But Van Eede, after setting the first half of the manuscript, became uneasy about its highly … Read more
Her analogy—a painful one, perhaps—was the conception of a child. If nature were purely animate, she wrote, “a Child in the Womb would as suddenly be framed, as it is figured in the mind.” To think of a child would be to have a child. Yet having a child required that the inanimate parts of … Read more
Half a century later, they still return our gaze, staring back at us in their dark dresses and white stockings, their white headbands pinned in place. The seven-year-old identical twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side, pressed together as if to create the illusion that they are conjoined. One twin smiles; the other … Read more
“Mrs. Justice Holmes died on Tuesday night,” the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, reported on May 5, 1929. Mr. Justice Holmes—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—had relied on his wife, Fanny Bowditch, for nearly everything. They’d been married for fifty-seven years. Her death “seems like the beginning of my own,” Holmes wrote. And yet, on the … Read more
In 1532, when the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina became the law of the Holy Roman Empire, it specified that witchcraft was a serious crime, punishable by execution by fire. The Carolina was often cited in the European witch trials that followed, with crazes peaking in the second half of the sixteenth century, and again in the … Read more
The first crime scene in the new season of “True Detective” isn’t that of the seven gnarled, naked bodies we see piled on top of one another in the snow at the end of Episode 1, but of a more mundane violence. A woman tries to flee her physically abusive boyfriend, and he tracks her … Read more
