Featured series 
Tag: Writing
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Nation & World
Author McGowan is honored as ‘2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year’
Can parents raise moral children without religion? Greg Epstein M.T.S. ’07 thinks so. He’s the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, and has just finished writing a book due out next fall. Its title: “Good Without God.”
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Nation & World
‘The health of poetry’
As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.
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Nation & World
Probing an unlikely friendship
Theirs was an unlikely friendship. One man was a black abolitionist, orator, and journalist who had been a slave from Maryland, the other a white politician from the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
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Nation & World
Houghton joins with libraries nationwide to celebrate artists’ retreat
HCL Communications It’s been said great art often grows out of tragedy — in the case of Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in upstate New York founded in 1900, tragedy spurred the creation of hundreds of great works of art.
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Nation & World
Gazette writer Gewertz dies at 63
Ken Gewertz, teacher, editor, and longtime staff writer for the Harvard University Gazette, died of cancer on Sept. 7 at his home in Watertown, Mass. He was 63. Gewertz gave 22 years of service to the University. As a reporter for the Gazette, he covered almost every aspect of life at Harvard, concentrating on the…
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Nation & World
Power of the pen in early America
In 1747, three members of the Abenaki Native American tribe and their Mohawk ally posted a petition on a wall of an English fort in the Connecticut River Valley. The paper was small, but it spoke volumes.
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Nation & World
HLS student makes journey back to Iraq
Those looking for a relaxing summer break may have opted for somewhere other than Iraq. But for one Harvard Law School (HLS) student, the visit to the country in August was about work — and duty.
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Nation & World
Houghton sets sights on reception
Houghton Library will host an opening reception on Tuesday (Sept. 16) from 5 to 7 p.m. for its major fall exhibition, “To Promote, to Learn, to Teach, to Please: Scientific Images in Early Modern Books.” The exhibition examines how images in early modern European books of science (1500-1750) not only were shaped by the needs…
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Nation & World
Harvard News Office writer Ken Gewertz dies at 63
Longtime writer for the Harvard News Office Ken Gewertz died on Sept. 7 at his home in Watertown, Mass. He was 63.
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Nation & World
Reminiscences of Maxim Gorky
In 1895, Russian journalist Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, a onetime shoemaker’s apprentice who had quit school at 10, adopted a new name: Maxim Gorky. After that, literary fame came fast and furious for this self-taught, fresh-voiced grandson of a Volga boatman. Gorky — the name means “bitter” — could tell a story, remember everything he read…
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Nation & World
Distinguished poet visits alma mater
Adrienne Rich, one of America’s most lauded poets and a major literary voice of the 20th century, returned to the place where it all began on a recent dreary Monday…
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Nation & World
Stephen Greenblatt to be honored
Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt will join seven other distinguished artists and writers to be inducted into the 250-member American Academy of Arts and Letters next month.
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Nation & World
The perils of historical fiction
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of the celebrated “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard last week (April 9-11).
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Nation & World
Vivian Gornick takes on novelists Bellow, Roth
This year, Vivian Gornick, — a writer who lives in New York City — is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She updated her observations on the brilliance (literary) and the failings (cultural) of male Jewish American writers of three decades ago on Feb. 4 in the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture…
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Nation & World
Golden to deliver Morris Lecture at Nieman
Tim Golden, senior writer for The New York Times, will present the 2008 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard on Feb. 21, 2008.
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Nation & World
Tenney Kelley Lehman, 90, headed Nieman Foundation
Tenney K. Lehman, 90, died on Jan. 7 at Coolidge House nursing home in Brookline, Mass. She was on the staff of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism from 1968 to 1985, retiring as executive director. Her life was defined by devotion to her family, dedication to finding meaning through poetry and writing, and determination…
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Nation & World
‘When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself’
A black comedy from the early 1960s with a title too long to fit the average marquee may seem an odd choice for the New College Theatre’s first production, but once you’ve heard the story behind the play, it makes perfect sense.
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Nation & World
Darnton looks at the ‘art and politics of libel’ in 18th century France
Government censors in pre-Revolutionary France were so hypervigilant that under their watchful eyes no one with anything significant to say dared publish their works in their own country. The solution was to publish abroad and smuggle the contraband books into France where they were soon snapped up by eager readers.
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”
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Nation & World
Harvard Magazine names Ledecky Fellows
Harvard Magazine’s Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows for the 2007-08 academic year will be Liz Goodwin ’08 and Samuel Bjork ’09, who were selected from a competitive evaluation of 30 student writers’ applications for the position — the largest pool of candidates in the program’s history.
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Nation & World
Rothenberg praises value of humanities
James Rothenberg is a leading figure in the investment world as well as being Harvard University’s treasurer and a member of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers.
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Nation & World
The many lives of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Most of us only get one life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – whose 200th birthday bicentennial is this month – has had four. In the first, he arrived in Cambridge in 1837, fresh from a six-year professorship at Bowdoin College. Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in…
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Nation & World
Orlov Rubinow, former Harvard University Press editor, dies at 81
Betty Ann Orlov Rubinow, 81, formerly of Cambridge, Mass., and Stowe, Vt., died unexpectedly from complications of pneumonia on Jan. 5 at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Tucson, Ariz., where she had lived with her husband, Merrill Rubinow.
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Nation & World
Playwright Mayer ’10 is recipient of arts award
Harvard College freshman and playwright Jonathan Mayer will debut “Mistakes, Inc.” as part of VSA arts 22nd annual Playwright Discovery evening Sept. 28 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. An international nonprofit organization affiliated with the Kennedy Center, VSA arts showcases the accomplishments of artists with disabilities, while promoting increased…
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Nation & World
Jill Carroll among fall fellows at Shorenstein
The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, located at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, recently announced its fellows for the fall. These Shorenstein Fellows will work on research projects while at the center.