The American Scholar

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.

1 week ago | theamericanscholar.org | Robert Zaretsky

Seventy-five years ago, on January 21, 1950, Eric Arthur Blair died of complications from tuberculosis at the age of 46. Months before his death, Blair, under the pen name George Orwell, had completed Nineteen Eighty-Four, a grimly prescient novel that has haunted the world ever since. And although Orwell spent his final days in a London hospital, he had hammered out the manuscript, in a desperate race against death, on the island of Jura.

2 weeks ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin.

2 weeks ago | theamericanscholar.org | Alix Christie

The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha S. Sandweiss; Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $32Few periods grip the American imagination like the bloody “Indian Wars” of the latter half of the 19th century. The Library of Congress contains nearly 80,000 titles on the subject, 800 of them from this century alone, and nearly all of them focus on bloodshed from the European perspective.

1 month ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

In 1978, a Swedish shipbuilder began construction on two new barges, never anticipating that the journey of these vessels would come to exemplify enormous changes in international law and the global economy. In his new book, Empty Vessel, Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ships’ journey from the docks of Stockholm to off-shore oil rigs in Scotland, across the North Sea to West Germany, to deployment in the Falklands War.