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I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of portraying society) and plotting (the ends of the individual’s story). What remained was character (subjective

The British author and satirist Craig Brown deserves credit for inventing a new style of royal biography in 2017 with his irresistibly readable Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. (In his native country, it had the superior title Ma’am Darling.) This new genre, which might be called pointilliste biography, took its subject and, through a series

When Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, it was the culmination of his lifelong mission to declare America’s linguistic independence from Great Britain. A free people with a distinctive national identity required a distinctive language, and that meant fighting off foreign influence, particularly what one author calls “nostalgia for