Roundtable

Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.

April 29, 2015

Fleeced!

By Paul Strohm

A medieval English poet exposes the country’s most corrupt industry—the wool trade.

April 24, 2015

The Rest Is History

By Angela Serratore

Books enjoyed by Frankenstein’s monster, real-life ends for the characters of Wolf Hall, and the closeted life of Mark Twain.

April 16, 2015

The Nun’s Story

By Sarah Laskow

A bestselling 1836 book offered unbelievable tales of sexual depravity in a convent.

April 16, 2015

The Rest Is History

By Angela Serratore

Henry David Thoreau’s neckbeard, amateur John Wilkes Booth historians, and the mystery of Morgellons Disease.

April 15, 2015

Learning from Lincoln

By Angela Serratore

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president enjoyed a production of “Our American Friend” at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Early the next morning, Lincoln died in a boarding house across the street—the first American president to be assassinated. With Lincoln’s death, the divided country lost not just its leader but one of its wisest thinkers, a man who had something to say on nearly every subject, and then some.

April 15, 2015

Creative Accounting

By Michelle Dean

For writers, self-employment brings with it artistic freedom and a tax nightmare. For the novelist Patricia Highsmith, living abroad solved exactly none of her tax problems.

April 09, 2015

The Gatsby Index

By Heather O’Donnell

This week marks the ninetieth anniversary of The Great Gatsby, first published on April 10, 1925. Gatsby enjoys such an iconic status among American novels that it’s easy to forget what a disappointing seller the book was for F. Scott Fitzgerald. His 1920 debut, This Side of Paradise, had been a surprise bestseller, and his next, The Beautiful and the Damned, was a hit as well: each sold about 50,000 copies. Fitzgerald privately considered The Great Gatsby “about the best American novel ever written,” and hoped to sell 75,000 copies.