Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreThough the American Civil War produced more and better books and writers than any single event in our country’s history, Bruce Catton is the greatest of its 20th century tellers. In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue tours the breathtaking work of an unfairly set-aside annalist.
Read MoreAt a poetry reading on the Palatine 2,000 years ago, you’d have spent a week’s pay to hear him read. Today he’s unknown, except to our Steve Donoghue (and a few of our readers, no doubt). Here, after a long time gone, is the Roman poet Tibullus.
Read MoreSteve Donoghue exhumes the sprawling, illuminating writing of Gregory of Tours, the wrongly forgotten 12th-century saint, historian, and natural-born raconteur
Read MoreIn this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the books of the 17th-Century physician Nicholas Culpeper, whose medicine may be archaic but whose wisdom and literary merit are by no means obsolete.
Read MoreIn our regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits Giovanni Guareschi’s Little World of Don Camillo, an eternally comforting fictional oasis set in the heart of the Cold War.
Read MoreIn this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the life and letters of John Jay Chapman, an eloquent American wit now forgotten, whose writings once provoked and delighted an enthusiastic public.
Read MoreGun-and-net-toting naturalists seldom produce a better writer than William Beebe. In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits the science writing of a more invasive age.
Read MoreWhat do we do with great novels by a writer who was also a Nazi? Steve Donoghue investigates the terrible conundrum of H.H. Kirst.
Read MoreIn this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue revisits the great life and writing of Gerald of Wales, a continuously frustrated candidate for the Archbishopric of Wales.
Read MoreIn this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue touts the overlooked sea novels of Nicholas Monsarrat.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.