Scott Bradfield

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

The filming of Edward Albee’s play with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton was a feat of creative struggle.

The writer’s collected letters are a glorious escape from the annoyances of social life into the splendor of prose.

The decline in his fiction over his lifetime was understandable. The mystery is why his worst journalism ever received such lavish praise.

How Charles Portis’s greatest success overshadowed the rest of his work

A new book traces Chekhov’s relentless work as both a doctor and a master of the short story.

In the quaint, well-to-do worlds of her novels, anyone could be guilty. Murderers kill to beat the social order at its own game.

Ada Calhoun set out to complete her father’s abandoned biography of the poet. She ended up with a reflection on living with art.

Is it possible to separate the celebrated novelist from the disgraced writer of fascist polemics?

A sweeping new history of American comics traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

Manhattan was the perfect subject for Barthelme’s comic fiction, a source of always-shifting relationships.

The creator of James Bond had an unremarkable career in intelligence and considered his own books “piffle.”

Why did readers search for deeper meaning in the adventures of the Peanuts gang?

Has any other novelist lived a life so steeped in political intrigue?

Francesca Wade’s book rediscovers the neighborhood that gave Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. a place to think and write.

For the late, great novelist, American politics was one end-of-times after another.

The great novels of the 1960s remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong.