Anne Beattie’s latest book, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, is a work of fiction. Yes, Mrs. Nixon, or Pat, or Buddy, or St. Patrick’s Babe in the Morn, or any other nickname listed on the first page of this hard-to-categorize novel, all refer to a real individual, the taciturn wife of former president Richard […]

The verse of Rita Dove has allowed her to traverse territorial boundaries and epochs of time, meditating on everything from the life of 18th-century violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower to Rosa Park’s 1955 protest in Montgomery, Alabama.