Randall Jarrell

Each novelist requires circumstance — a situation to describe, from which a conflict arises — and the ivy-covered college hall or dormitory room provides such context readily. It would take research and, thereafter, expertise to write about...

"The Ask" By Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 296 pages,$25 It would be an inspired feat of academic guerilla terrorism to sabotage every American College Freshman Summer Reading Program by supplanting the usual earnest offerings with Sam Lipsyte's...

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop?...

Critics don't get much respect. (Pause here for raucous laughter.) If you doubt it, look up the word "critic" in any book of quotations and see what you find. H.L. Mencken's "New Dictionary of Quotations" is full of zinger after zinger, most of which...

W.D. Snodgrass, the prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a nearly 40-year teaching career, has died in upstate New York. He was 83. His family said he died Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., just east of Syracuse, after a four-month...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....