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.

Old Man River

The American Scholar

Gone Fishin' • Could two famous rivermen really have met their end while grappling giant fish in a Kansas river?

Paint It Black • The allure of the pigment that has polarized like no other

A Room of Their Own • The guest room is more than just a place where visitors can crash

A Visit to Epidaurus • When a play ends with a dismemberment, the effect on the audience can be transformative

Expect the Worst • Sometimes we free ourselves by embracing our darkest fears

Redemption Song • What the rehabilitation of Pete Rose says about American society today

Helping Doug • At a tent encampment in Oregon, one man struggles to survive as medical volunteers try to bring a measure of light to dark, uncertain days

Blood-Blue Sky • How horseshoe crabs and ecological grief connect with the wonders of the human heart

Second and Long • Why did James Whitehead—poet, fiction writer, and onetime college football player—fail to complete a successor to his celebrated first novel?

The Go-Between • One of America's most celebrated women war correspondents walked a fine line between journalism and espionage

All Shall Be Well • My father's experiences aboard a World War II bomber became the narrative of a life he could never have invented

The Ancients Among Us • THE PRESENT AND THE PAST IN THE VERSE OF JOHN TRIPOULAS

Banana-Yellow Trabants • Skinning my knees in 1980s communist Bulgaria

Trading Places • In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks each made a film that bore hallmarks of the other's work

Scrolling Through • Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Cowley, and the difficult birth of On the Road

Ruins

TOO ALONE IN THIS WORLD, YET NOT • A newly opened archive reveals further contradictions about a poet steeped in paradox

A STRANGER EVERYWHERE • The inner world of one of America's great warrior poets

THE EGOIST • When a Zen master loses his way

TIME FOR A DEMOTION • We aren't as special as we think

GOD ON THE SYLLABUS • A century after Bryan took on Darrow, battles over public school curricula rage on

DADA MAMA • The writer who made modernism mainstream

DIVIDED FRONT • A conflict's conflicted history

Commonplace Book

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