The American Scholar

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar is the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.

Remembering Sara

The American Scholar

A Newer Species of Trouble • When the lines between natural and technological disasters become blurred—and ultimately erased

A Night at the Bougainville Roxy • America’s post-Depression enthusiasm for movies extended to its theaters of war

Any Way You Can • This is what can happen when you’re abandoned in a war zone

Adding Wimsey to My Life • How I fell in love with a fictional detective

Save the Meramec • On law, literature, and the Indiana bat

You Must Remember This • On the nature of autobiographical memory

Thanatos Rising • A 1930s correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud laid out each man’s views on war and peace

Twain Town, U.S.A. • Samuel Clemens is everywhere in Hannibal, Missouri, but is the story the town tells about its favorite son grounded in reality or myth?

What Remains • We may know that nothing lasts forever, but this knowledge doesn’t alleviate the loneliness of grief

Against the Norm • ETYMOLOGIES OF DISABILITY AND RACE IN THE VERSE OF SUJI KWOCK KIM

Found in Translation • The act of rendering plays from Romanian to English has allowed me to discover my family’s past—and myself

Our Versatile, Durable Pickup • The story of a vehicle that is many things to many people but is, above all, an American icon

Once More in Triple Time • In Salzburg, the tourist hordes come for Mozart, but imagine an alternate city, one where a very different composer is venerated

My Teacher • Through periods both fallow and rich, Lore Segal knew only one way to spend her days—by writing

Fireflies

ON THE TRAIL WITH AN ARKANSAS TRAVELER • Charles Portis looked past our national mythology to portray the real America

INSIDE MAN • A young reporter’s devastating exposé of the amoral elite

THINGS FALL APART • A meditation on entropy, obsolescence, and death

INTO THE WILDS • The tangled terrain of untrammeled lands

THE PAINTER TIME FORGOT • An overdue reckoning of an artist’s volcanic genius

WHERE ARE WE? • Finding our bearings has never been so risky

CANONICAL CONTEMPT • Even in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon’s misogyny set him apart

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