Episodes

Matt Gallagher is an American writer who served in the Iraq War as a U.S. Army captain. He first became known for his blog, which was shut down by the military, and his subsequent war memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Sa...

"Keats is with Shakespeare," wrote Matthew Arnold, and few would disagree. His life was short, but his poetry is deep and his legacy long enduring. Who was this man? How did he overcome his lowly origins and become one of the...

Agatha Christie is one of the most successful writers of all time - it's often said that sales of Christie's books are surpassed only by Shakespeare and the Bible. But who was Agatha Christie? What was she like before she bec...

Since the publication of the first volume of his massive novel Mein Kampf (or My Struggle ) in 2009, Karl Ove Knausgaard (1968- ) has become a household name in his native Norway - and a loved and hated literary figure around...

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born in Quebec, immigrated to Chicago, and became one of the greatest of the great American novelists. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize for writing that displayed "the mixture of rich picaresque nove...

Fellow poet Naomi Shihab Nye says that Bob Holman's "life gusto and poetry voice keep the world turning." In this episode of The History of Literature, we tap into that voice, as Bob Holman joins us for a rollicking conversat...

Jacke takes a look at the astonishing life and works of William Blake (1757-1827), a poet, painter, engraver, illustrator, visionary, and one of the key figures of the Romantic Period. How did the boy who saw God's head in a ...

Jacke welcomes in the new year by taking a deep dive into the melancholy (and beautiful) short story "Gooseberries" (1898), by the Russian genius Anton Chekhov. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyoflite...

Through novels like To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway , and essays such as "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) has inspired generations of followers, particularly young women. But who were the women who inspire...

In this special 200th episode of the History of Literature, Jacke and Mike discuss one of Mike's all-time favorite novels, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain . What does Mann do well? What makes this novel so great? And what do...

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a man who loved ciphers and a cipher of a man, an Anglo-Irishman who claimed not to like Ireland but became one of its greatest champions. He was viewed as an oddity even by the friends who knew...

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston in 1932, the daughter of a German-born professor, Otto Plath, and his student, Aurelia Schober. After her father died in 1940, Plath's family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, wher...

A week ago, Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) turned 80. A month ago, she was awarded the Booker Prize for her eighteenth novel, The Testaments . But how did the little girl who grew up in the forests of Canada turn into one of the m...

We all know how difficult it is to scale the mountain of success, whether you're a musician or a novelist. But why do some artists reach the summit again and again, while others spend the rest of their careers stuck in the va...

He was born to a lower class family of tradesmen in 1840. Eighty eight years later, he died as one of the most celebrated writers in England. His name was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and he was at the same time the product of t...

Jacke and Mike take a look at contemporary author George Saunders, author of Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln at the Bardo , In spite of some inauspicious beginnings, Saunders somehow managed to ascend to literary g...

It's been called "the great Shakespearean play of stage superstition and uncanniness." It's also one of Shakespeare's four major tragedies, and for more than four hundred years it's proved horrifying to audiences and captivat...

Jacke's joined by the Hall of Fame Guest Mike Palindrome (President of the Literature Supporters Club) for a look at the ten greatest films by the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock directed dozens of films, incl...

Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart (1959) ushered in a new era where African countries, which had recently achieved post-colonial independence, now achieved an independence of a different kind - the freedom of imag...

"England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion," wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain’s role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-thre...

"Gogol was a strange creature," said Nabokov, "but genius is always strange." Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809 – 1852) rose from obscurity to a brilliant literary career that forever changed the course of Russian literature. B...

They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Their names were Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960), the author of Their Eyes Were Watching...

Although their lives were filled with darkness and death, their love for stories and ideas led them into the bright realms of creative genius. They were the Brontes - Charlotte, Emily, and Anne - who lived with their brother ...

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) went from a childhood in the western islands of Scotland to the heights of literary popularity and success, beloved and admired for his adventure stories Treasure Island and Kidnapped and hi...