William J. Maxwell

From one angle, at our hundred-year distance, Hurst’s schmaltzy naturalism makes her a kind of art monster in reverse: not a great avant-gardist with noxious politics and a track record of abuse, but a respectably woke voice, responsibly raised for some of the right intersectional causes, with an unforgivably corny style. From another, equally telling angle, however, Hurst’s work nowadays looks like some of the most cannily effective proletarian literature ever produced in the United States.

  Claude McKay, born on September 15, 1889, in rural Nairne Castle, Jamaica, thrived on shifts of locale and identity. He was a writer of pioneering dialect verse and a national culture hero on his native island; one of the inventors and toughest critics of the Harlem Renaissance; a producer of blockbuster novels (1928’s Home […]

Thanks to brand-new ancestors, St. Louis time has been reset and, for the moment, along this part of the river, restored.

Never better read or better loved—you can now buy votive candles bearing Baldwin’s image at your local indie bookstore—he has also never been a harder story to pass on.

The most extraordinary thing about Amiable is that it was ever rescued from hiding. As the novel’s scrupulous and publicity-savvy editors suggest, “the discovery of an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript by a major modern writer is a rare occurrence.”