We begin our story at the end. The end of what, you ask? The end of silent comedy. It is March of 1949, twenty years after sound came to Hollywood and laid waste to the traditions of silent slapstick. It is St. Patrick’s Day, and the California Country C

Buy This Photo Gil Scott-Heron in 1984. His memoir consists of pieces he wrote over many years, from the 1990s to 2010. When the poet, novelist, piano player and spoken-word recording artist Gil Scott-Heron died unexpectedly last May at 62, he left behin

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Ayad Akhtar's American Dervish is a bittersweet and moving coming of age story, an auspicious debut novel from Ayad Akhtar.

In 1981, Robert Fisher bought his first photograph: "Mississippi Town Negro Quarter," a typically direct and poetic 1936 image by Walker Evans, the pioneering American documentary photographer whose potent art Fisher would collect in great abundance. It

"Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona: Now that the campaign surge of Pennsylvania's "favorite son," Rick Santorum, keeper of public "morality," has turned media attention to the culture wars, it behooves us to consider what kind of s

A Fortunate Man, Penguin Books, 1969. Photograph: Jean Mohr For a book that can justly be called a masterpiece, John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, first published by Allen Lane in 1967, is not nearly as well known