The American Scholar

The American Scholar is a literary magazine published every three months by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was founded in 1932. Since 1999, it has received fourteen National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors, including honors for General Excellence in the category for magazines with a circulation over 100,000. Moreover, the magazine has been recognized with four UTNE Independent Press Awards from Utne Reader, with its latest win in 2011 for "Best Writing."

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Family Values - The American Scholar

2 weeks ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father’s Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson’s administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked.
Sticking With It

3 weeks ago | theamericanscholar.org | Juli Berwald

They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah Blake; Crown, 320 pp., $30Investigative journalist Mariah Blake’s They Poisoned the World will inevitably be likened to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s 1962 account of the chemical pollutant DDT was a national wake-up call that inspired the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.
The Rascal of Pont-Aven

3 weeks 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.
Visions From Jura

1 month 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.
Lingua Obscura - The American Scholar

1 month 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.
An Enigma at the Center

1 month 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.
The Shipping News

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.
Coming Home - The American Scholar

2 months ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and fall from faith in rural Wisconsin. Now he returns to the story of his life with Ginseng Roots, which focuses on a minor detail that Blankets omitted: namely, 10 summers he spent as a boy weeding and harvesting American ginseng for a dollar an hour.
Muscle Memory - The American Scholar

2 months ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the ancient Greeks perceived strength—and muscles themselves—entirely differently from us.
The Most Famous Unknown Artist

Mar 28, 2025 | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental albums.