Eugene O’Neill, master of American theatre
O'Neill introduced psychological and social realism to the American stage. As his masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night opens in the West End, Sarah Churchwell assesses his impact on modern dramaIn June 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald received a letter fr...
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1
Hemingway's letters burst off the page with brilliance, wit and rageIt has been widely remarked that F Scott Fitzgerald is enjoying a renaissance; his erstwhile friend and eternal rival, Ernest Hemingway, would be apoplectic with rage at the idea of be...
Smut: Two Unseemly Stories by Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett's witty, sly stories are a delightAlan Bennett once remarked that his stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows was partly about "keeping it under", in which Toad doesn't actually change his ways, but instead simply learns to "counterfei...
Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher: the iron ladies
Monroe and Thatcher might seem to have played opposite roles. But the biographical films My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady suggest that their similarities outweighed their differencesIf imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, impersonation is...
Next to Love by Ellen Feldman – review
Is this novel of postwar gender and identity politics a little too neat?Ellen Feldman's previous novel, Scottsboro, brilliantly retold the story of the so-called "Scottsboro boys", a group of black men wrongly accused by two white women of rape, and co...
How to Survive the Titanic by Frances Wilson
The story of the man who fled the Titanic has echoes of Conrad's novelIn April 1912, on its maiden voyage, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and went down in the north Atlantic; of its 2,223 passengers, 1,500 perished. On board was th...
The Lovers by Vendela Vida
Admirable prose in a darkly elegant novelThe Lovers seems a deliberately misleading title for Vendela Vida's slim, reflective third novel: a 53-year-old American woman named Yvonne, whose husband was killed in a car accident two years earlier, returns ...
Rereading Mildred Pierce
Todd Haynes has adapted Mildred Pierce, James M Cain's novel about a divorced mother in the depression, as a sumptuous TV mini-series. But what has been gained and what lost in the process?Edmund Wilson once called James M Cain (1892-1977) one of Ameri...
There but for the, by Ali Smith – review
The story of a dinner guest who refuses to leave develops into a satire on the way we live now in Ali Smith's enjoyably playful new novelIn 1939, George S Kaufman and Moss Hart had a big hit on Broadway with The Man Who Came to Dinner, the st...
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain – review
Sarah Churchwell sees Hemingway through the eyes of his first wifeThe 1920s is back in vogue: Baz Luhrmann is remaking The Great Gatsby, a staged reading of Fitzgerald's masterpiece proved a big success off-Broadway last year, and HBO's 1920-set Boardw...
Michael Gove is right about reading – so fund humanities | Sarah Churchwell