From the FBI file on Lloyd Louis Brown, who wrote the prison novel Iron City (1951), edited several Communist journals, and coauthored Paul Robeson’s autobiography, Here I Stand. The file…

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By Frederic Morton, from a speech given at the Vienna Haus der Barmherzigkeit two days before he died, in April. Morton was a critic, an essayist, and the author of…

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This vague put-upon feeling had been bothering me for some time, but only recently did I finally realize that I’m just one victim of a vast conspiracy. Chances are that…

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Tommy, Beauty, and Baby had set up a harmonious household when a pet store offered an irresistible bargain in the form of an additional pair of young marmosets that nobody…

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I just squandered two or three precious should-be-working hours trundling around music-streaming sites looking for “The Banks of Sweet Italy,” my all-time favorite Incredible String Band song. Dotty, druggy, sublime…

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from the archive 50 years ago in Harper’s Magazine Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one…

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From a previously unpublished journal entry by Allen Ginsberg, dated February 18–19, 1965, and collected in The Essential Ginsberg, which will be published next month by Harper Perennial. In 1965, Ginsberg accepted…

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From Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, edited by Walter Kempowski, out this month from W. W. Norton. On April 25, 1945, Soviet…

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From a conversation with Raul, a resident of Manhattan, included in The Edge Becomes the Center, an oral history of gentrification in New York City, by D. W. Gibson, out…

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