On Avoiding ‘Prosperous Wickedness’
On Essays and LettersOn my desk, I have a copy of the 2003 Penguin edition of Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays. When I turn on my computer to warm up, I have about two minutes of reading, which I do at random from Johnson. It is amazing what you find in Johnson. He was...Out of the Nursery to College, Back to the Nursery
Anti-Intellectualism and Authentic Learning in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451In a letter dated January 22, 1951 to Richard Matheson from Ray Bradbury discussing “The Fireman,” the short story that would develop into Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury explains, in part, his...Running About with Lit Matches
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451. “As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over.” Regarding the friendship between Ray Bradbury and Russell Kirk—two writers...
The Pulpy Roots of ‘Fahrenheit 451’
Ray Bradbury (1923–2012) early found his métier in two forms, the short story and the thirty-minute radio drama. Three excellent literary mentors advised and worked with him when he was in his twenties—Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987) and Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) for...The Marilyn Monroe of Modern Literature
An interview with Carl Rollyson.The University Bookman recently sat down with Carl Rollyson, past contributor to our special issue on biography and author of a new biography on the poet Sylvia Plath and of Amy Lowell: A New Biography, forthcoming in September 2013....Eliot’s Politics in Context
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, by Leon Surette. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Cloth, xv + 363 pages. $59.95.Some years ago at a conference a speaker mentioned in passing that Eliot had “flirted with fascism.” This comment...Tolerance that Swallows Itself
The Intolerance of Tolerance by D. A. Carson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Cloth, 196 pages, $24.D. A. Carson, a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete, has written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an...Debunking the Demographers
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last. Encounter Books, 2013, Hardcover, 240 pages, $24. Demography can be dull; to call it unimaginative would be to give it too much credit. But then there is Jonathan V....Beyond the End of History: Fukuyama’s Myopic Vision
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 Hardcover, 608 pages, $35. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the “end of history” was realized with the...
"Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU..."