This month we marked the Ralph Ellison centennial, celebrating the author of Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. Although he became… Read More »Ralph Ellison and Telling Stories of Invisibility
In the 1930s young people with little experience, like Margaret Walker, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, got on their feet with jobs as WPA writers.… Read More »Young People, Passions, and a WGA Screenplay Reading
This week 85 years ago, amid the Great Depression, the first in a series of quirky travel guides to America came out. Idaho: A Guide in Word and Picture was not the debut for the American Guides that federal officials had planned. Idaho had less than half a million residents and few people were planning to go there.
As featured this week on NPR’s quiz show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, Uneek Dolls gives Etsy shoppers a chance to give their favorite author… Read More »Give an Author this Holiday – Action Dolls?
Stetson Kennedy records his wife Edith in 1939. Stetson Kennedy, who died on Saturday as Hurricane Irene stormed up the East Coast, had a love… Read More »Stetson Kennedy Delved into Florida Life
On the streets of Washington, DC these days, it’s easy to walk right past addresses that are not famous but from which great things –… Read More »Watch Those Footsteps on the Capital Sidewalks
Now in West Africa for a month with an IRP reporting fellowship, and just getting my bearings in Mali’s capital with a walk through the… Read More »Now for Something Completely Different
An amazing exhibit at the International Center for Photography in New York captures the images of three photojournalists as they peered through their lenses at… Read More »Reporting on Civil War in the Mediterranean
Fifty years ago today, Richard Wright died in Paris, just over 50 years old. From a poor sharecropping family in Mississippi, he grew up in… Read More »Richard Wright, 50 Years On
Here we mark the release of a new DVD box set of Humphrey Bogart films, including his memorable angry man in Black Legion (watch a… Read More »Un-American, the Label
