Episodes

Jacke talks to Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant about her journey to becoming a wildlife ecologist and two classic works from the 1960s that helped inspire her: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) and Rachel Carson's Sil...

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at two topics. First, the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, whose children's book Tales from Shakespeare (1807) was published more than two hundred years ago and has never been out of print. ...

For more than two centuries, the author Mary Shelley (1797-1851) has been eclipsed by others: her famous parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her even more famous husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even her own crea...

It's October! Time for dead leaves, spooky twilight, and little goblins running around in search of candy. And of course, the OG Mr. October, Edgar Allan Poe. In this episode, Jacke (finally!) accommodates the voluminous requ...

We all talk about actors who use the Method, but do we really understand what that means? And how exactly has the Method changed the way we take in drama? In this episode, Jacke talks to theater expert Isaac Butler about his ...

Although best known for his classic children's books involving Alice and her Wonderland adventures, Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was a man of many talents and interests. In this episode, Jacke talks to Carrollinian scholar and b...

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) started a firestorm with his 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover , which was quickly banned around the world. But the novel eventually found its way into print, after winning numerous obscenity trials...

Jacke takes a look at the early years of Percy Bysshe Shelley, from his idyllic childhood, to his rebellious student years, to his experiments in free love, radical politics, and Wordsworthian poetry. Works discussed include ...

As the author of what is generally considered the first and perhaps greatest novel of the modern era, Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece Don Quixote belongs on every shelf. But as two scholars point out in their new book...

The British spy novel was well established long before Ian Fleming's creation of James Bond in the 1950s. And while it came to be identified with the Cold War, thanks to Fleming and subsequent writers like John le Carré, thri...

In 1994, Harold Bloom's magnum opus The Western Canon took up the critical cudgels on behalf of 26 writers declared by Bloom to be essential. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick (aka the Book Maven), literary critic and host of...

The warrior and leader known as Bābur (1483-1530) had the kind of life one might expect from the descendant of Timur (Tamburlaine) on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's. Elevated to the throne at age 12, and t...

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when reading novels was not a common activity - and then, suddenly, it was. In this episode, Jacke talks to Jason Feifer, an expert on transformative changes in society, to see h...

Today, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) might be best known for her groundbreaking feminist novel The Awakening (1899). But she was also an accomplished short story writer, publishing in national magazines like Atlantic Monthly and Vo...

Sure, we know poets are experts in subjects like love, death, nightingales, and moonlight. But what about money? Isn't that a little...beneath them? (Or at least out of their area of expertise?) In this episode, Jacke talks t...

In 1922, a writer for the Observer commented: "No book has been more eagerly and curiously awaited by the strange little inner circle of book-lovers and littérateurs than James Joyce's Ulysses." After declaring Joyce to be a ...

Responding to a listener email, a heartbroken Jacke takes a close look at Emily Dickinson's astonishing poem "A Bird, came down the Walk." Additional listening suggestions: 120 The Astonishing Emily Dickinson 418 "Because I c...

The History of Literature Presents: Missing Pages

He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904, but in the next 87 years, the world came to know and love him by his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Best known for his more than 60 books for children, including The Cat in the Hat , How the Gr...

In our last episode, we looked at the decision by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard to purchase a printing press and run it out of their home. What began as a hobby - a relief from the strains of writing - soon turned in...

Virginia Woolf has long been celebrated as a supremely gifted novelist and essayist. Less well known, but important to understanding her life and contributions to literature, are her efforts as a publisher. In the decades tha...

Is this the greatest man vs. nature story ever? Hard to say. But it just might be the purest . Kicking off a new HOL feature, producer Emma chooses a short story for Jacke to read and discuss - Jack London's classic "To Build...

"All you have to do is write one true sentence," Ernest Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast . "Write the truest sentence that you know." And so he did: the man wrote thousands of sentences, all in search of "truth" of some kin...

Very few writers have had the influence or importance of Langston Hughes (1902?-1967). Best known for poems like "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," and "The Weary Blues," Hughes was also a widely read novelist, short sto...