Allen Tate

Allen Tate has taught both here and abroad, lectured at over 100 American universities, and published 20 books during his career as one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Tate's honors include a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the Brandeis Medal Award. He was the first consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress and in 1968 served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time. Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen's agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal.

Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation“When Lincoln took office, in March 1861, the national government had no power to touch slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln understood this, and said as much in his first inaugural address, noting: ‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.’”

The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-WorldHusserl, Heidegger, Arendt, PatočkaUčník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.

Driven toward MadnessThe Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the OhioThe story of Margaret Garner—the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery—has inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera.

Drawing on the VictoriansThe Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic TextsLate nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership.

Winter of ArtificeThree NovelettesSwallow Press’s reissue of Winter of Artifice, with a new introduction by Laura Frost, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of Anaïs Nin who laid the groundwork for later writers, but whom critics frequently dismiss as solipsistic or overblown.