By: Lucy Sante

JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the […]

By: Lucy Sante

THE SUBJECT, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. […]

By: Lucy Sante

ASIDE FROM BRANDY and cigars, no product on the market is packaged quite as traditionally as cigarette papers. Nearly every item on your grocer’s shelf gets an image update every few years to make sure […]

By: Lucy Sante

If CHESTER HIMES (1909-84) hadn’t found himself broke in France in the mid-1950s he might today be remembered only as the author of some acute, painful treatments of racism and prison life — the kind […]

By: Lucy Sante

THAT IS THE APT TITLE of the Columbia University fight song. It’s odd that I remember it, because I can’t have heard it more than once or twice — my time there was the absolute […]

By: Lucy Sante

ONE DAY VERY SOON it will happen that our heroes, having searched and studied ancient property maps on file at the bureau of records, having rented a basement storage space on the opposite side of […]

By: Lucy Sante

“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The celebrated first line of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by JAMES M. CAIN (1892-1977) tersely illustrates his verbal and narrative economy as well as […]

By: Lucy Sante

PANCHO VILLA (born Doroteo Aranga Arámbula; 1878-1923) was an outlaw with a world-class strategic intelligence who became a general during the chaotic and unending Mexican Revolution. John Reed was present in the Governor’s palace in […]

By: Lucy Sante

Witty and brutal, poetic and blunt.