Episodes

Jacke takes a look at the first work of literature by an African American author, courtesy of Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts by Uli Baer and Smaran Dayal. Then he turns things over to Storybound, a Podglomerate podcast, for a conversation with author Melissa Chadburn and excerpts from her essay "The Throwaways." Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYRB, Longreads, Paris Review online, and dozens other places. Her essay on food insecurity was publ...

Celebrating 400 episodes of The History of Literature, Jacke and Mike respond to a listener poll and choose the Top 10 Episodes We Must Do in the Future. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 83 - Overrated! Top 10 Books You Don't Need to Read Episode 149 - Raising Readers (aka the Power of Literature in an Imperfect World) Episode 92 - The Books of Our Lives Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a memb...

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) lived fast, died young, and impressed everyone with his prose style and insight into the human condition. While he's best known today for his novels The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (along with some classic short stories like "The Open Boat," "the Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"), his literary fame during his life was supplemented by his notorious exploits. Shipwrecks, romance, scandal, and high-profile court cases - and he som...

Questioning the nature of the self is a standard trope in literature and one of the hallmarks of the Modernist movement. But no one pushed this to the extreme like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). While the use of a pseudonym or two is common enough, Pessoa wrote poems as more than a hundred "heteronyms" (as he called them), giving many of them their own richly developed biographies, writing styles, and distinct subject matter. The wild cast of characters, who sometimes argued with o...

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat to a Canadian poet and his wife, the beautiful, accomplished, and slightly mysterious Assia Wevill. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began having an affair. Within a year, Assia was pregnant with Ted's child and Sylvia, after years of suffering from depression, had committed suicide. Six years later, Assia would do the same. It's a horribly tragic tale, like something out of Shakespeare, with genius and artistic ambition and love and s...

Ultimately, the marital relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was filled with pain and ended in tragedy. At the outset, however, things were very different. Within months of their first meeting at Cambridge, they had fallen in love, gotten married, and started having children - all while writing poetry and supporting one another's art. What did they see in each other as people and as poets? How did they inspire and encourage one another? In this episode, Jacke talks to Plath's biographer H...

Jacke plays a clip from Nabokov discussing his famous novel Lolita, in which the frantic narrator Humbert Humbert recounts his passionate (and illegal, immoral, and illicit) love for a young girl. After hearing from the author, Jacke plays clips from three History of Literature Podcast interviews: Jenny Minton Quigley, Jim Shepard,, and Joshua Ferris. Additional listening: Episode 318 - Lolita (with Jenny Minton Quigley) Episode 96 - Dracula, Lolita, and the Power of Volcanoes (with Jim S...

What narrative techniques did Freud borrow and employ? What was the effect? And what did it mean for the literary critics who followed? Following his look at the life and major works of Sigmund Freud, Jacke describes Freud and his followers' at-times fraught relationship with fiction and fiction writers, with a particularly close look at Freud's famous work "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." PLUS a preview of our upcoming episodes featuring Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Assia Wevill. ...

Still recovering from his immersion in Sigmund Freud, Jacke looks instead to one of the world's great literary cities: Odessa. More than 300 writers have lived in, traveled through, and/or written about Ukraine's "pearl of the Black Sea" - what did they find so compelling? And what did they write about afterwards? PLUS we continue our conversation with Scottish novelist Margot Livesey, who has been reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, generally considered one of the greatest biographies ever writt...

As the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Although many of his claims and theories are still hotly debated, for decades his ideas dominated writers and thinkers around the world - and they continue to exert a major influence on how we view ourselves and our society. In this episode, we look at Freud's life and some of his most famous works, setting the stage for an analysis of Freud's impact on literature. Add...

Mark Twain was an enormously successful writer and a horrendous businessperson, with a weakness for gadgets and inventions that cost him a fortune.. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at his efforts to start his own publishing company, which started off strong but quickly descended into bankruptcy and ruin. What was he trying to accomplish? And what were the books that brought him down? After that, Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for part two of ...

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Victor Hugo (1802-1885), whose poetry, plays, and novels made him one of the leaders of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. In addition to his famous novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, we also look at some of his lesser known works; his family background; the legend of his conception in a Roman temple atop a mountain; his belief in the transformation of poetry throughout the history of human civilization; and the gusto with which h...

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Such is the opening of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the novel that won the National Book Award but repulsed the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Pynchon's special blend of paranoia and postmodernism made him one of the hallmark authors of the Cold War era. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Pynchon's life and works, then is joined by a contemporary author, Antoine Wilson (Mouth to Mo...

"I am never too busy to think of S&S," Jane Austen wrote to her sister, referring to her 1811 novel by its initials, "I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her suckling child." Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen's first published novel. First begun when she was in the throes of her doomed dalliance with Thomas Lefroy, the novel contains the familiar Austen project of a Hero, a Heroine, a Search for Love, and the Obstacle Called Money. In this case, the heroines are two sisters named...

What's it like to be in love with a genius? How does one express oneself? Jacke takes a look at a beautiful 1926 love letter that Vita Sackville-West sent to Virginia Woolf. Then Professor Lauren S. Cardon, author of FASHIONING CHARACTER: Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature, stops by for a discussion of how authors use fashion choices to reveal character - and how this has changed over time. Lauren S. Cardon is Associate Professor of English at the University ...

Jacke takes a look at Nikolai Gogol's early stories about his native Ukraine, including two famous descriptions of Ukrainian nights. Then Jacke turns things over to Eve and Julie from the Book Dreams Podcast, as they interview a scholar about a surprising find: in 2019, a librarian in Bristol discovered four scraps of parchment bearing the names "Merlin" and "Arthur." Their guest, Dr. Laura Chuhan Campbell, was part of an interdisciplinary team working to determine the origins and significance o...

In November of 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln boarded a train for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His heart was heavy with the cost of two years of a bitter civil war, his body fatigued and feverish from what was likely the onset of smallpox. In the midst of personal grief and political turmoil, he drafted and delivered one of the greatest political speeches ever written. In roughly 270 words, the Gettysburg Address (or "America's Gospel," as Tom Brokaw called it) managed to pay tribute to falle...

Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters' Club, joins Jacke to select the top 10 literary terms and devices of all time. PLUS Jacke reads a letter to a young writer from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Additional listening ideas: Fan of Fitzgerald? Try our episode on The Great Gatsby or revisit the time Jacke and Mike looked for 10 new arguments in the Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald debate. More of a Hemingway fan? A full-of-nostalgia Jacke dug into Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises i...

"Goodnight comb and goodnight brush...And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush...Goodnight moon.." Telling the "story" of a darkening room at bedtime, Goodnight Moon (1947) has gone from near obscurity to selling close to a million copies a year. But if you thought - as Jacke did - that the author of this odd, quiet book was probably something of a quiet old lady whispering hush herself, you couldn't be more wrong. Margaret Wise Brown was radical young woman who blew her money on furs an...

Love is all around! On podcasts as well as holidays... In this episode, Jacke talks to USA Today bestselling author Mimi Matthews about her love for the Victorian era and how that fueled her latest work, the historical romance The Siren of Sussex, in which an ambitious equestrienne teams up with a devastatingly handsome half-Indian dressmaker to take London society by storm - unless their professional plans are thwarted by their amorous propensities toward one another. Jacke also checks in with ...

C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1923) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Known to his fellow Tamils as the "Mahakavi" ("Supreme Poet"), his works modernized and rejuvenated Tamil literature. Bharati, who knew several languages, also wrote in English, and it is in these writings that one can see and appreciate his range of interests, the depth of his thinking, and his passionate advocacy for social reform. In this episode, Jacke is joined by Bharati scholar Mira T. Sundara Rajan, ...

Ian Fleming (1908-1964) always wanted to be a writer. Not an "author," as he put it, and not someone in the "Shakespeare stakes," but someone who wrote for money and pleasure. In developing his enduring character James Bond, he managed to accomplish both. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and career of the most famous spy novelist in history. PLUS we look at an American spy novel, Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which was poised for success - until some terrified auth...

When the poet Gwendolyn Brooks "writes out of her heart, out of her rich and living background, out of her very real talent," said The New York Times, "she induces almost unbearable excitement." From her "headquarters" in Chicago, Brooks spent her life writing poems about the joys and struggles of the Black Americans on the streets around her. A consummate artist with full command of her craft, along with an insatiable curiosity and a deep well of empathy, Brooks produced more than 20 volumes of...

In this episode, Jacke talks to Jeremy Tiang about his new translation of The Wedding Party, a Chinese classic contemporary novel written in the early 1980s by Liu Xinwu, one of the originators of what has been termed "scar literature." PLUS we feature a sneak preview of our conversation with Professor Mira Sundara Rajan, who has edited a collection of writings in English by famed Indian poet C. Subramania Bharati. Looking for more by Chinese authors? We talked with Yang Huang about her child...