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This article, keyed to The Age of Innocence, takes as its point of departure the resistance from students that many teachers encounter when they assign the novels that Edith Wharton centered in wealthy, privileged New York society. There is indeed, in each of these novels, a central story that dominates and occupies nearly all the surface, dealing with the personal and familial problems of rich people. But there is a second story, about servants and workers and providers of the comforts that the wealthy deem essential. It is important to respond to and understand the first story through a keen awareness of the second, which can be done by reading The Age of Innocence “from below.” When teaching this novel and others like it in subject and setting, it is thus helpful and illuminating to bring the second story forward. Reading from below enables readers to appreciate Wharton’s style and vision more deeply and makes her work more accessible to and rewarding for students.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is one of the best known and most widely read and taught novels in American literature. It is so familiar that even those who have not read it believe that they have and take for granted that they know about its main character and theme of the American Dream. We need to approach The Great Gatsby as if it were new and really read it, paying close attention to Fitzgerald’s literary language. His novel gives us a vivid depiction of and insight into income inequality as it existed in the 1920s and, by extension, as it exists today, when the American Dream is even more limited to the fortunate few, not within reach of the many. When we really read The Great Gatsby, we perceive and understand the American dimension of the novel and appreciate, too, the global range and relevance that in it Fitzgerald has achieved. It is a great American book and a great book of world literature.

We are in the midst in the United States, the world’s foremost capitalist country, of a surge of interest in Socialism. Many Americans contend, or at least have begun to imagine, that Socialism might remedy income inequality, limited or flawed health-care, poverty, hunger, and other ongoing social and economic problems. Yet few Americans know much about the history of Socialism, and about its major U. S. advocates and campaigners, above all Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926). Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs was a socialist, political activist, charismatic speaker and writer, radical trade-unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States, and a passionate fighter for free speech and the right to dissent. He is a powerful source of inspiration and enlightenment for those drawn to the theory and practice of socialism, and for those who believe in the possibility of a new American revolution.

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.

Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose range and mass of published and unpublished work, produced during his all too brief life (he died at age 44), is astounding. Thoreau is an inspiring radical voice for personal change and social reform, yet he is, at the same time, extremely self-centered and highly skeptical about the capacity of readers and audiences to bring about the transformations that he advocates.

Brilliantly written, powerfully argued, The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1948, is flawed for readers today because of serious gaps and omissions, in particular its lack of reference to African American figures and sources. Late in his career, Hofstadter began to broaden his range of reference, calling attention in vivid prose to the horrors of slavery during the long period of American settlement and colonization. This later emphasis exposes all the more the shortcomings of The American Tradition, yet, at the same time, it does not diminish the rhetorical power and insight of this important book. It remains a significant work of American history but, even more, we should read and respond to it now as a major achievement, a distinguished act of writing, in the field of American literature.

The year 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. His plays are read, interpreted, and performed throughout the United States and the world, and from the early seventeenth century onward, the praise bestowed on him is hyperbolic, as if he were superhuman, even divine. Biographies of Shakespeare abound and often are informative, but not about Shakespeare himself, for we know very little about his day to day activity. Biographers thus imagine and invent the life, using speculation and conjecture as substitutes for evidence and fact. We do know much about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater and about London acting companies. We know too that for his company, Shakespeare was an actor and a sharer (an investor who shared in the profits) as well as a playwright. But none of the original scripts that Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote has survived. There are no manuscripts in Shakespeare’s hand, nor did he prepare and authenticate any of the published texts we possess. Hence we do not know for certain what the world’s greatest writer actually wrote. Shakespeare’s plays are a supreme fiction, and this more than anything explains his astonishing longevity and renown.

Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, based on his November 1933–March 1934 safari to Kenya and Tanganyika, and published in October 1935, is often overlooked, even by many Hemingway scholars, and it is not widely read or taught. But it is a crucial book for our understanding of this brilliant, tortured writer. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway constructs a portrait of himself that is radically disturbing. As much or more than anything he wrote, it reveals the ongoing challenge we face in coming to terms with Hemingway as he represents himself in his work – how best to approach and interpret him, how to describe him as a literary fact and presence.

Ernest Hemingway’s aesthetic—a better term than style—is based on constant acts of choice, decisions that he makes as a writer at every moment about which word and phrase to set down on the page. All writers must make choices—what to include, what to exclude. Hemingway is special because his work as a writer foregrounds this fact. The structure of Hemingway’s sentences makes the reader keenly aware of the words that he has selected and, just as much or more, the countless other possibilities that he has not selected. Hemingway first presented and developed his aesthetic in his major novels and short stories of the 1920s. But this high level of achievement proved very difficult for Hemingway to sustain in the decades that followed. The story of his aesthetic, the shape of his literary career, is both triumphant and tragic.

Acknowledgements Introduction What is Postmodernism, and What Difference Does It Make? Chapter One Politicizing Authority, Authorship, and Identity in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo Chapter Two Combative Textualities-Kathy Acker's The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec Chapter Three Don DeLillo's White Noise: Reading Consumers and the Politics of Commodified Education Chapter Four Repoliticizing Depoliticized Categories: Literary Inheritance, Textual Activism, and the Space of Reading

Reading Jack London's letters is a grim experience, and even devotees will be disturbed by the portrait of the abusive man and money-hungry writer that emerges from them. The letters are contained in three well-edited volumes, and credit should go to Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, and I. Milo Shepard for their meticulous preparation of the nearly 1,600 letters for publication. Yet their superb job has the dismaying result of making London himself seem supremely unattractive-cruel, callous, bigoted, self-pitying, and consumed by the chase for wealth. Signs of trouble appear from the outset, and the reader then watches in bemused horror as London's notions about racial and ethnic groups and strategies for self-promotion are expressed in increasingly grotesque forms and with numbing frequency. As early as August 1896, in a letter to the Oakland Times written when he was twenty, London refers to "the people" as the "the great seething masses" and stresses how easily the great majority of men and women are "deceived" (1: 5). The letter emphasizes the evils of the competitive capitalist system and the falsehoods that it imposes on those caught within it. But London's language intimates his shock at, and contempt for, the foolhardy behavior of "the masses" and his sense of lofty superiority to them. He identifies himself as an advocate of socialism and spokesman for the "brotherhood of man," yet he flaunts a zealous belief in dominating leaders, self-approvingly detaches himself from the workers with whom he claims to be in sympathy, indulges in raw stereotyping of gender roles, and haughtily endorses lurid assumptions about the unconquerable greatness of Anglo-Saxons and the animalistic backwardness of everybody else. Particularly when writing to Cloudesley Johns, a socialist critic and journalist in San Francisco, London is quick to express his social Darwinism: "An evolutionist, believing in Natural The Letters of Jack London

What follows is an interview with my colleague and friend, Arthur R. Gold, conducted a few weeks before his death from lung cancer on 31 December 1988 at the age of fifty-three. Arthur published a number of reviews and articles for Commentary, The New York Times, Book Week, and the Nation, and, during his battle against the disease that took his life, he composed a beautiful series of poems. Two of these appeared in the Paris Review and the New Republic, and the collection was published, after his death, under the title Poems Written During a Period of Sickness. But Arthur's major scholarly enterprise, an ambitious study of the men he termed "America's aristocrats" (Henry and William James, Henry Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Charles Sanders Peirce), was just reaching fruition as the cancer struck. When it became increasingly clear during the late fall and early winter of 1988 that Arthur would not recover, I began to tape our conversations about his planned book. He looked forward to these hours, which gave him intellectual pleasure and distracted him from his pain. I finished the final interview with Arthur a week before Christmas and was able to show the transcript to him before he died. Arthur was a very modest man--brilliant, widely read, yet always unassuming-and a wonderful colleague and legendary teacher. During the two years that he suffered with his illness, he taught as long as he was able, continued to read everything that came his way on every conceivable subject, and relished his exchanges with his many friends about literature, religion, history, and politics. During my visits to his home, Arthur spoke keenly about the Bible, Blake, his Jewishness and my Catholicism, Milton, Melville, Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and, of course, the "American aristocrats" whose careers and writings