Danny Heitman

Danny Heitman on a pocket-sized collection of Christmas cheer.

Danny Heitman on the 1842 visit left the novelist profoundly unhappy with America and its capital.

Danny Heitman on the slender volumes of Notting Hill Editions—treats for the mind.

Danny Heitman on PBS’s ‘The Durrells on Corfu’ and the island childhood that inspired Gerald Durrell’s career.

Danny Heitman on why it is so difficult to see the great polymath and his work clearly

‘Pasta for Nightingales’: A charming Renaissance collection of birdlore and beauty.

Seeking redemption in subtle, everyday quiet.

In 1885, nearly broke from bad investments and dying of cancer, Ulysses S. Grant spent his final days writing the bestselling memoir that gave his family financial security after he was gone. The story of Grant’s swan song seems memorably American, touched by the mythic national themes of boom and…

A half-century after her death, Carson McCullers is best known for The Member of the Wedding, her 1946 novel about a motherless 12-year-old girl who watches the planning for her brother’s nuptials and feels distanced from the rest of the family. Adapted for stage and screen, McCullers’s story is…

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

In recent years, John McPhee’s writing has become more retrospective, a natural sensibility for a man now 86 years old. A case in point was his 2010 book Silk Parachute, a collection of essays and reportage that also stood out for its uncharacteristically personal tone. From the title essay, a…

In 1926, the British author Henry Green (1905-1973) published the first of nine novels that would gain him critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother didn’t quite know what to make of them. She loved to read, but didn’t partake of much fiction, so wasn’t sure how to assess her son’s…

Last year, at age 70, Annie Dillard received a National Medal for the Arts and Humanities for, as the citation put it, “her profound reflections on human life and nature." The presentation, made at the White House, had a valedictory air, as if capping a career that's more or less concluded. A…

At his cabin near Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau famously kept three chairs: "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." Even when he sat alone, Thoreau contained multitudes. We know him best as the man who lived for two years in a hut in the woods, recording his experiment in…

At his cabin near Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau famously kept three chairs: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." Even when he sat alone, Thoreau contained multitudes. We know him best as the man who lived for two years in a hut in the woods, recording his experiment in…

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

When John James Audubon created The Birds of America, his landmark pictorial survey of avian life, he was thinking of America in a broad sense—namely, the wildlife habitats in and around the whole North American continent. Most of the species in his massive, four-volume book were seen and drawn…

In This Old Man, his recent collection of autobiographical and critical writings, Roger Angell fondly recalls how his boyhood was shaped by the fabled Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Celebrity gossip is such a fixture of modern life that it’s easy to assume we invented it. But long before TMZ, the E! channel, and People began chronicling the lives of the glitterati, the Englishman John Aubrey (1626-1697) was jotting juicy tidbits about his contemporaries and near-contemporaries…

Since Gore Vidal died at age 86 in 2012, the passage of time has invited the question of how—or if—he'll be remembered in popular culture.

Hearing about someone else’s office politics can often be like eavesdropping on his class reunion, the narrative too narrowly tribal to interest those of us beyond the clan. Even so, for more than half a century, books about the inner workings of the New Yorker have attracted a loyal audience. Dale…

During a literary career that lasted a quarter of a century, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) published six novels of the macabre, a collection of short fiction, two books for children, a play, and two comic memoirs of motherhood​—​enough work to fill a small shelf. But she’s best known for a nine-page…

The English writer and artist Max Beerbohm lived between 1872 and 1956, nearly 84 years in all. But early on, he cultivated his career like a man with little time to lose. Fresh from Oxford, he began contributing witty articles to the Yellow Book, a lively quarterly associated with Oscar Wilde and…

As conceived by its creator, Matt Weiner, the television show Mad Men is a running catalogue of dissolution: Its various characters lie, cheat, steal, drink, smoke, and fornicate their way up the corporate ladder in a 1960s New York advertising agency. Weiner frames their sins as occupational…

Although he’s revered as a great classic writer, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) is an author we read because we want to, not because we have to. He’s intimate, erudite, chatty, and expansive—qualities well suited to the peculiar genre he essentially created. While puttering around his tower…