Tag Archives: Jona Whipple

John Cheever and the Loneliness of Suburbia

John Cheever, America’s foremost documentarian on the lifeless routines and endless yard maintenance of suburbia, [...]

War of the Words: Cather vs. Hemingway, 1923

In 1922, Willa Cather’s foray into the subject of World War I, One of Ours, [...]

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On Regret

We often think of a well-received, award-winning, widely-read piece of published writing as a triumph [...]

Fireworks and Breezeblocks: The Music of American Writing

In November of 2010, Katy Perry’s dance-pop anthem to confidence, “Firework,” debuted on the American [...]

Writing the Darkness: American Writers and Mental Illness

In his 1936 essay for Esquire, “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote loosely, as if [...]

Steinbeck’s Monterey

Of all the American writers influenced by a sense of place, there were perhaps few [...]

Sex and the City and the Best of Everything

Shortly before Rona Jaffe’s death in 2005, she wrote the foreword for a reissue of [...]