Richard Lingeman: 5 books

From one of our finest cultural historians, The Noir Forties is a vivid reexamination of America's postwar period, that “age of anxiety” characterized by the dissipation of victory dreams, the onset of the Red Scare, and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus. Richard Lingeman...

This unvarnished collection of articles traces evolving issues and provides a unique history of the long-running national immigration dilemma. American immigration has been debated in the pages of The Nation almost since its founding in 1865. The magazine has generally come down on the inclusive...

Writing in her native “Texlish,” Molly Ivins planted herself squarely in the tradition of plain-spoken and earthy American humor, the big river that runs from Mark Twain straight through to Will Rogers, Ring Lardner and George Carlin. Between 1982 and 2007, Ivins contributed seventeen...

The essays collected here all appeared in The Nation magazine between 1958 and 2005. The early literary ones reflected Vidal’s status as a rising young novelist of the postwar generation, and as he expanded confidently into nonfiction, his essays range widely over politics, religion, society, manners...

The novelist E.L. Doctorow, who died in 2015, will long be remembered for his highly imaginative historical fiction. In intricate and profound works like Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The March and many others, Doctorow helped redefine American fiction by subverting our received ideas about the past and...