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.

Night Watch

The American Scholar

Bards Behind Bars • Reading Sartre aloud inside a maximum-security prison

Corona Chasers • You never forget your -rst solar eclipse

Riding With Mr. Washington • How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction

Just When You Thought It Wasn't Safe … • How Wilbert Longfellow turned America into a nation of swimmers

For Whom Do We Create? • The conundrum facing so many American artists today

A Forgotten Turner Classic • Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?

Imperfecta • Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Next New Thing • In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

To Catch a Sunset • Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

Florida Baroque • THE TROPICAL VERSE OF ANGE MLINKO

Four Poems

Femmes Fantastiques • Mickalene Thomas and the art of remixing

The Given Child • To what lengths would a mother go to ensure her family’s survival in a remote Himalayan village?

Martha Foley's Granddaughters • What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

Rage, Muse • The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or forgotten

Up Close

THE RESCUER • In search of the Underground Railroad’s legendary conductor

RHYME, NOT REPETITION • All that’s past isn’t necessarily present

SURVIVAL SITUATION • The debate over evolution and its discoverer

FACING THE FACTS • An antiquated take on antiquity

WE ARE THE BORG • Is the convergence of human and machine really upon us?

NUMBERS GAME • A novelist’s indictment of how we account for our history

BORN TO BE WILD • One founding family’s centuries-long journey

UNCONTACTED • Indigenous civilizations thrived long before Europeans showed up

Commonplace Book

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