“The object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake.” … “And the single deep voice of the singers lay upon the dance, lay even upon the valley and the earth, whole and inscrutable, everlasting.” …

  I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. —John Gardner, when asked what effect he thinks his writing has had on people, in conversation in The Paris Review, is…

Baseball and Hemingway in Kansas City.Ninety-eight years and twenty-one days ago—October 15, 1917—a kid moved into a boarding house in Kansas City. He was a nobody, then, but his uncle, Alfred Tyler Hemingway, had gone to school with the Kansas City …

Toward the end of 1918, infantry from the U.S. Army’s 85th Division occupied Arkhangelsk, a city in North Russia on the shore of the White Sea. They had come with other Allied troops to rescue the stranded Czechoslovakian Legion, forty thousand sol…