Articles

  • 6 days ago | theamericanscholar.org | Hannah Stamler

    Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux; W. W. Norton, 416 pp., $39.99In the crowded field of problematic male modernists, Paul Gauguin leads the pack. There is arguably no 19th-century painter with a lousier public approval rating. The charges against him are varied and severe. He drove Vincent van Gogh to madness, then abandoned him in Provence, severed ear and all. Years later, he pulled a similar vanishing act on his wife, trading marriage for dissolution in French Polynesia.

  • Feb 8, 2025 | nybooks.com | Hannah Stamler

    After seeing “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., I revisited Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). The memoir, perhaps more than any other single text, is responsible for the romantic myth of the Lost Generation. In Hemingway’s recollections, for a moment in the 1920s, Paris—or at least its Left Bank—was ruled by a band of bright and restless expatriate men. F.

  • Aug 6, 2024 | thenation.com | Hannah Stamler

    Can we count on you? In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win. We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives.

  • Mar 18, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Hannah Stamler

    One of the few records of my great aunt that survives is a death certificate. Dated 23 December 1935, it specifies that Florence Portia Evans, a ‘research worker’ in her early twenties, died in New York City of ‘post-abortal’ septic endometriosis.1 In the dry language of municipal bureaucracy, the article confirms a family history passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me.