Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Emily Grant Hutchings was born on January 30, 1870 in Hannibal, Missouri to Carl Schmidt and his wife. Carl was a minister and Emily’s mother was a doctor. Emily and her husband, Edwin, met Mark Twain (also from Hannibal) in June 1902. Emily and Mark Twain exchanged a few letters about writing after their meeting. On the envelope of one of the letters, he wrote “Idiot! Preserve this.” Emily mostly...

Napoleon had had a rollercoaster eighteen months. First he had been forced to abdicate as Emperor of France and exiled to the island of Elba. Then he had managed to escape, march on Paris, and retake the throne. Finally a crushing loss at Waterloo had led to exile once again, this time to a far more remote island called Saint Helena. The watery walls of his new South Atlantic prison...

Collotype is a dichromate-based photographic process invented by Alphonse Poitevin in 1855,[1][2] from which beautiful tonal images can be reproduced without the need for halftone screens. Because of its ability to print fine detail, it was also used for business cards and invitations with fine script lettering. The stunning floral images featured here are the work of Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the...

In an era that fetishizes form, Oates has become America’s preëminent fiction writer by doing everything you’re not supposed to do. In Joyce Carol Oates’s novel “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart” (1990), Jinx Fairchild, a star high-school athlete, is assigned a five-hundred-word paper on the topic “I Believe.” To his surprise, Jinx finds himself endlessly tweaking the essay—“in a ferocity of concentration,” Oates tells us, “as...