Shy and reclusive, he did not want to accept his Nobel in person. But he rose to the podium and lit a candle for humanity

Reading science fiction, Octavia Butler saw no one like herself. So she vowed to “write myself in.”

Turning his back to the continent, Robinson Jeffers offered an answer for our own troubled times.

After reading with Ginsberg, teaching Zen to Kerouac, Gary Snyder followed his own path to become “the poet laureate of deep ecology.”

Our National Pastime thrived on legend until Jim Bouton toppled the pedestals. Was that Mickey Mantle pinch hitting with a hangover?

Like Thought Woman of Laguna lore, Leslie Marmon Silko dreams whole worlds of reality and myth.

He was a drunk squandering his talent. She was a poet who believed in him. Their love saved the “modern master” of the short story.

A refrigerator note. A spark of genius. A classic poem and the senders it inspired.

When The True Believer made his name, Eric Hoffer was a San Francisco longshoreman. Decades later, the zealots he labeled “true believers,” are still “everywhere on the march.”

June 6, 1944 — Sgt. Salinger, with drafts of The Catcher in the Rye in his pack, lands at Normandy.

"The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave." -- Rebecca Solnit

The study said… The study said… Then Carol Gilligan realized. The study had only studied boys. Might girls speak “In a Different Voice”?

Long before Martin Luther King, W.E.B. DuBois had a dream.

On Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac expected to find God. Instead he found himself, and his best book, The Dharma Bums.

A century ago, in the bleakest of years, other poets despaired.  But one lit her candle -- at both ends.

How Langston Hughes touched bottom during the Depression and wrote an American anthem.