Studies of Willa Cather refer to Charles Darwin so rarely that one might conclude she hardly knew of him. But at least one recent interpreter has begun to discuss the Darwinian shadow in her work, describing the “Darwinist cartography” in her novel The Professor's House (1925) and noting the “striking parallels between Cather's mapping of America and that undertaken by her near contemporary, Thorstein Veblen.”

For the Slovenian-born journalist, novelist and populist historian Louis Adamic, Ellis Island was as central to American civilization as Plymouth Rock. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, Adamic dedicated himself to raising public awareness about the essential role of immigrants in the life of the nation. Adamic chronicled the stories and contributions of famous and not-so-famous immigrants from a variety of ethnic groups and challenged his adopted country to be true to its democratic ideals.

Four months after the first issue of Life magazine reached the news-stands a reader commented on Life's portrayal of African Americans:

May I take this occasion to express to the editors of Life our appreciation for the magnificent photographs of Negroes, including Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, flood refugees and others which have appeared in recent issues of Life? This fair pictorial presentation of various aspects of Negro life is of inestimable value in helping to give a more balanced concept of the American Negro, which in turn helps all Americans.

We want you to know how much we appreciate what you are doing.

The Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was among the most influential thinkers in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. In a series of books published during the period, including The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), and The Irony of American History (1952), as well as numerous shorter pieces, Niebuhr challenged Americans to develop a more complex and profound view of their history and political life. His major thesis was that individual pride and self-love, which he called “original sin,” were the chief source of conflict and injustice in human society. Neither mass education, enlightened social policy, or worker revolution could change the basic fact of human nature: people were driven by a need to wield power over others and were too often tempted to pursue evil over good in order to attain power. Although humans were capable of positive actions, even these contained within them the seeds of destructive ego-force.

Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man has elicited more than its share of critical attention ever since its first appearance in 1952. It continues to fascinate critics because, like one of its forebears, James Joyce's Ulysses, Ellison's novel contains enough material to occupy them for a very long time, no matter what their reading orientation might be. According to Crushing Strout, “Invisible Man has generated metaphysical, psychological, existential, symbolist, and folkloristic readings – all of which have their basis not only in critical fashion but in the fecundity of the novel's linguistic energy” (80). What's more, Strout's list of possible interpretive orientations doesn't begin to exhaust the fecundity of approaches one can take to the text. Ellison's novel continues to call for new ways of being read, new contexts in which to be placed so as to be better understood and appreciated.

Mary McCarthy had, and has, a formidable reputation in American intellectual life. Brilliant, beautiful, much feared for her biting wit, she is a major figure in the histories of her time and in the biographies of her friends, lovers, and enemies – notoriously unstable categories. She was, with her great friend, Hannah Arendt, a certain archetype of the independent and engaged intellectual. Although she began life as a member of the provincial Seattle upper middle class, and in her final years she constructed a life in Maine not remote from the ideals of that class, its constraints, and decorous pleasures, in her youth and early maturity she lived a myth of New York bohemia: poverty-stricken, promiscuous, politically of the Left. Such is her image. It is not an inaccurate story. It is merely incomplete. For during much of that time, for fifteen or twenty years, her milieu was defined not so much by the culture of the Left, as by that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Not that she was an official of the Agency; nor was it that she was one of those – like Arthur Schlesinger or Philip Rahv – who were more or less associated with it. She simply lived in a cultural matrix saturated with its influence, where she published in its journals, attended its conferences, stayed in the homes of those who were in its employee or who were members of the families of CIA officials. It is not, or should not be, controversial that such circumstances had an influence on her thought and work as it had on the thought and work of her contemporaries.