I like European and South American literature, but mostly…

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison … Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be…

— James Branch Cabell

“I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger…

— John Fante

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably…

— Raquel Cepeda

Héctor Tobar's accomplished first novel affords a perspective that is overdue and urgently needed in North American literature- -an insider's vision of L.A. as…

— Stuart Dybek

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't…

— Anatole Broyard

I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a…

— Sherman Alexie

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example,…

— Glenn Ligon

“Don Raimondo tells me what he can’t tell them. “The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the…

— Erri DeLuca

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of…

— James Wolcott

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of…

— H. L. Mencken

“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize…

— Mark Twain

“Sociologically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, it was never enough for James Baldwin to categorize himself as one thing or the other: not just black, not…

— Aberjhani

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got…

— James L. Brooks

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

— Ernest Hemingway

“Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up…

— Jill Lepore