In 1957, Harvard University considered offering a faculty appointment to the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. In opposition, the eminent linguist Roman Jakobson asked his colleagues: "Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?"

This fall, students...

Though not yet reflected in census statistics, snark, the language of sneers, smirks, and snide asides, is now spoken in more American households than Portuguese. If snark is the native tongue of any particular minority, it is surely the tribe of professional critics. Consider Dale Peck's infamous review of the...

In an act of spectacular revisionist chutzpah, Karl Rove is now portraying George W. Bush as a devoted bibliophile. The man who marketed Bush as a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas exuding righteous disdain for elitist intellectuals has just published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "

John F. Kennedy inaugurated the custom of inviting a poet to read at presidential inaugurations. "When power leads man to arrogance," Kennedy, the only presidential recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, said, "poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the...

Indignation
By Philip Roth
Boston; Houghton Mifflin. $26. 256 pp.

The 1950s, the decade of the Red Scare and suburban ticky-tack, was a time of collective sedation. Philip Roth's new novel, Indignation, is set in 1951, and it is appropriate that the book's first and longest section is...

1940
By Jay Neugeboren
Minneapolis; Two Dollar Radio. $15. 276 pp.

Mary Shelley describes how Dr. Victor Frankenstein created his infamous monster. But what about real-life monsters? What accounts for the malignity of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin? Young Adolf Hitler was, according...