The American Scholar

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar is the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.

Trials

LETTERS

Reading the River

The Lost Lakes of Iran

Growing Up

Renaissance Woman

Alone, Together

The Ghosts in the Hills

Decoding DNA

Literary Information Derived From Privileged Writers • Did they know how good they had it?

The First President To Be Impeached • ANDREW JOHNSON BEAT THE CHARGES AGAINST HIM BY A SINGLE VOTE, BUT WHAT DID THE NATION LOSE?

Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969)

“Is Life Worth Living?” • Jacques Barzun asked this question half a century ago

The Hedgehog’s Great Escape • A YOUNG FRENCHWOMAN WHO RAN THE ALLIES’ MOST PERSISTENT SPY GROUP WAS IN THE GESTAPO’S GRASP

Afterlives

FIVE POEMS

Orwell’s Last Neighborhood • WHILE ENVISIONING THE DARKEST OF FUTURES AND GRAPPLING WITH MORTALITY, THE ENGLISH WRITER RETREATED TO AN IDYLLIC SCOTTISH ISLE TO WRITE NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

At Play in the Fields of the Bored • AMERICA’S NEWEST CITY PARKS ARE CHOCK-FULL OF THINGS TO DO—BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DELIGHTS OF IDLE TIME IN A NATURAL SETTING?

The Man Behind the Counter • A NEIGHBORHOOD GROCER, INSCRUTABLE AND GRUFF, LINGERS MYSTERIOUSLY IN MY MEMORY

The Third Obituary of Anton Popov

The Fantastical Little Dyer • Few artists could match Tintoretto’s mastery of color and form—or his sense of playfulness

The Sound of Evil • How did classical music in movies and television become synonymous with villainy?

Southern Cassandra • Lillian Smith was a writer and a radical who called out her region’s lies about sex and race

Shrinking Success • Psychopharmacology has not lived up to its early promise

Continental Drift • Westward expansion delayed a needed national reckoning

The Writer at Ground Zero • The chronicler of the first horror of the nuclear age

How the South Rose Again • Defeated in war, the Confederate states merely changed tactics

Freedom of Thought • The philosophical currents that shaped our nation

Thank you, friends! • THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR thanks the following people for their financial support in 2018.

Prophets of the Avant-Garde • How two power couples changed the world of art

His Life Spoke Volumes • The man behind the great Enlightenment encyclopedia

Commonplace Book

AMERICAN PLACES