John Rodden’s most recent books are Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology, and Eastern German Identity (2013) and The Unexamined Orwell (2012).
Nonfiction
Fall 2009
The Mysterious (Un) meeting of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway
I Seventy years ago, as the Spanish Civil War still raged, an English writer who had fought for seven months with a minor independent left-wing, quasi-anarchist militia, published a memoir […]
Nonfiction
Fall 2007
Kultur Clash at the White House: Dwight Macdonald and the 1965 Festival of the Arts
I. If you dabbled in left-wing politics at virtually anytime during the three decades after World War II, you could be certain of one thing—J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was maintaining […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2006
Fellow Contrarians? Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell
I Christopher Hitchens is one of our most prominent and controversial public intellectuals. He has criticized Mother Teresa, condemned Henry Kissinger, and nodded to Rilke with his own Letters to […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2004
The Worlds of Irving Howe
What would happen if men remained faithful to the ideals of their youth? —Pietro Spina in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine Waiting for Socialism Irving Howe was fond of telling […]
Interview
Spring 1998
A Harsh Day’s Light: An Interview with Marge Piercy
Even the directions for the journey on Route 6 to Marge Piercy’s home in bucolic Wellfleet, Massachusetts, have the feel of a literary odyssey. Follow Main Street west to the […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1991
“The Responsibility to Tell You”: An Interview with Isabel Allende
INTRODUCTION Until she was thirty-one, the heroine was living a happy, successful life as a Chilean journalist and mother of two. Suddenly, with the assassination of her uncle, president of […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1990
George Orwell, Pickwickian Radical? An Ambivalent Case
I Eleven-year old Eric Blair first attracted her attention, recalled childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom years later, when she spotted him in a nearby field doing something she hadn’t seen before: […]
Jan/Feb 2017
Profess or Perish?
Dreaming My Life Away? In 1992, as my head wrestled with my heart about whether to leave the only life I knew—the academic life I had once loved—I was invited […]