The historian David Blight has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal naming his top-five novels about the Civil War. Only one of the novelists is a Virginian: Mary Johnston. Here’s what Blight wrote about her Cease Firing, published in 1912. Born into a well-to-do Virginia family in 1870, daughter of a Confederate officer [...]

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The poet Eleanor Ross Taylor died on December 30 in Falls Church. The longtime Charlottesville resident had been married to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Peter Taylor, but was a respected artist in her own right. “The poet was known as a quiet, genteel and reclusive person,” writes The Daily Progress, “who often worked in her [...]

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On on the occasion of her birthday, here’s a bonus fact about Constance Cary Harrison: she seems to have been responsible for convincing the poet Emma Lazarus to pen her famous sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Harrison herself told the story years later. She approached [...]

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Willa Cather‘s birthplace, a tw0-story log house on Back Creek near Winchester, is for sale. In 1950, Charles Brill’s parents bought the house, and he spent most of his life on the property. Now Brill is looking for a buyer who can maintain the house—perhaps even a member of Cather’s family. Brill is committed to selling [...]

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Eleanor Ross Taylor is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her collection Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. From our entry: Taylor’s poetry is most often compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. “[O]f course I loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of [...]

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I love it when the New York Times uses big words like crepuscular, as in the “strange crepuscular tradition” of some black-clad dude visiting Edgar Allan Poe‘s graveside every year on his birthday—which was yesterday—bearing three red roses and a bottle of Cognac. The tradition goes back to 1949, apparently. But the visitor—whose identity, or [...]

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New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.” The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time [...]

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James Branch Cabell‘s novel Jurgen (1919) is reviewed at my new favorite blog-slash-literary website, The Second Pass. The review begins with this evocative epigraph . . . “I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don’t know why, exactly. The book hurts me—tears me to small [...]

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In 1818 Thomas Jefferson declared the “objects” of an education at the University of Virginia. To wit: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts in writing. To improve, [...]

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Edgar Allan Poe‘s 1849 obituary, as it appeared in the Baltimore Sun: DEATH OF EDGAR A. POE — We regret to learn that Edgar A. Poe, Esq., the distinguished American poet, scholar and critic, died in this city yesterday morning, after an illness of four or five days. This announcement, coming so sudden and unexpected, [...]

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The novelist William Hoffman died September 13. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch: With 14 critically acclaimed novels and four short-story collections to his credit, author Henry William Hoffman should have been a literary giant, his fans said, but he never found mass-market fame. “Bill Hoffman was probably Virginia’s least-known best writer—an author recognized by his peers [...]

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Last week, on October 7, was the 160th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe‘s death. Meanwhile, the critic Allen Barra wonders if Poe really matters anymore: Though he is still widely praised by most critics and his work still included in many anthologies, Poe may be fading into that twilight realm, indeed as he was as [...]

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Well, almost. Yesterday we called attention to our Anne Spencer entry. Back in March, the Legacy Museum in Lynchburg screened a film by Keith Lee about the poet called Anne Spencer Revisited. Turns out Lee had originally wanted to do a dance, an idea that came to him after visiting Spencer’s Lynchburg home. Keith Lee [...]

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Encyclopedia entries are deceptively hard to write, and our entries on writers are perhaps the most challenging. You want to get all the interesting biographical stuff in there while also doing justice to the art. Who is this poet as a person, but also who is this poet as a poet? On a good day, [...]

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The Washington Post reports this morning that John Grisham is writing a screenplay about the so-called Norfolk Four, four sailors who claim to have been wrongly convicted in the rape and murder of a Norfolk woman in 1997. The men confessed to the crime, but following their guilty verdicts, recanted, claiming they had been coerced. [...]

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I just got my hands on the brand-new scholarly edition of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, the last novel by Willa Cather and the Virginia-born writer’s only book set entirely in the state. (Our entry on the book is finished but not yet posted live. Same with our entry on Cather.) Anyway, I’ve already learned [...]

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What was Chester the Crab’s take on Nat Turner’s Revolt, you ask? Or maybe you were just about to ask. Either way, here it is, courtesy of Bentley Boyd, a Virginia-based cartoonist who, like so many other Great People, is actually a native of the Midwest. When I met Bentley, we were both manning booths [...]

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Yesterday I vented on behalf of the great state of Iowa, a squarish polity whose flag is largely French, whose capital is positively monk-filled, and whose luminaries include Herbert Hoover and Ashton Kutcher. And I quoted at length from an essay published in These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s by one Johan [...]

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In a post the other day, I mentioned that a blogger for the Atlantic had compared Scott Roeder, who allegedly murdered a doctor because he performed late-term abortions, to John Brown. Another Atlantic blogger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has now brought Nat Turner into the discussion. Coates’s point, actually, is that if we’re going to engage in [...]

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The man pictured above is James Branch Cabell, the Richmond-born author of fifty-two books, one of which, Jurgen (1919), was the subject of an obscenity suit in New York and briefly banned. And let’s face it, he looks like the sort of dude whose book might be banned for obscenity. The portrait is by Carl [...]

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