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Enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Find out more at historyofliterature.com and facebook.com/historyofliterature...
It's Episode 800! Jacke celebrates the milestone by talking to Shakespeare scholar Indira Ghose about her book Shakespeare in Jest, which dr...
Happy Mother's Day! Jacke takes advantage of an error to revisit a conversation with novelist Laurie Frankel about her book Enormous Wings,...
As Jacke and Emma travel to England for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests....
Is there such a thing as a general human nature? And if so, does Shakespeare serve as a "faithful mirror" to it, as Dr. Johnson claimed? In...
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this...
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this...
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this...
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this...
In addition to being an accomplished lawyer and a highly influential music critic, the nineteenth-century German Romantic Ernst Theodor Amad...
The 1920s were a tumultuous time for Russia, as the nation careened from the aftermath of revolution to the death of Lenin, the establishmen...
In this episode, Jacke talks to author Eileen Sperry about her book This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric, which examines...
The "Forgotten Women of Literature" series continues with a look at Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (1569-1645), the first Englishwoman to publish a...
What happens when an abnormally average man is suddenly on a path to greatness, as his picks in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament start p...
In 2025, Jacke began a countdown of the top 25 greatest books of all time, as part of a series called "25 for 25." In this episode, Jacke re...
Nineteenth-century art critic and polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a visionary thinker and influential social commentator who revolution...
In his book Why Poetry, the poet Matthew Zapruder issued "an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for it...
A member of the Cherokee nation, John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) lived a dramatic life full of contradictions. He also became the first Native...
Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. In this episode, Jac...
In the fourth century B.C., Plato famously posited a philosopher-king as the ideal ruler for his imagined Republic. Five hundred years later...
The world has a northern bias: our politics, culture, and literature all tend to view the northern viewpoint as the default position, leavin...
Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. In this episode, Jacke talks to...
"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It, "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of p...
In an 1886 letter to his brother, Anton Chekhov delivered some advice about truthfulness in writing. "Don't invent sufferings you have not e...
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His plain, economical prose style--inspir...
For thousands of years, writers from ancient China to contemporary meme-makers have demonstrated the power of the short, witty, philosophica...
Jacke kicks off the episode with an analysis of T.S. Eliot's underappreciated poem of urban alienation, "Preludes." Then scholar and transla...
As fans of the novel know, Frankenstein began with a flash of insight during an ill-fated holiday near Geneva in the summer of 1816, when th...
When assessing the literature of an era, we tend to think of the works that have made it into the canon - but in so doing, we're in danger o...
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) suffered from poor health for most of his life, and yet he possessed immense vitality. In this episode, J...
In mid-December 2025, the world was shocked by the horrible and tragic news that beloved film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Sing...
The Ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) called his history of a war between Athens and Sparta "a possession for...
Robin Lithgow spent her life immersed in the performing arts, including a childhood in the theater and decades spent as an educator and arts...
Civility can help a society overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good--and when political and religious factions threaten...
The Romantic poet Byron (1788-1824) was more than just the scandal-ridden celebrity who was famously dubbed "mad, bad, and dangerous to know...
The American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) spent the second half of his life as a fixture in American intellect...
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair... In this epi...
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) has long been one of the most famous - and most polarizing - figures in modernism. Was she a trailblazing genius?...
In Puritan New England, a young man leaves Faith, his wife, to go into the forest to meet the Devil. It's a story "as deep as Dante," said H...
What do we talk about when we talk about ancient Romans? For many of us, it's typically a fairly narrow slice of history: the toga-clad figu...
After the publication of her debut novel Wuthering Heights in December of 1847, Emily Brontë - still writing under her pen name Ellis Bell -...
“A sonnet,” said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “is a moment’s monument.” But who invented the sonnet? Who brought it to prominence? How h...
Stephen Mitchell has translated or adapted some of the world's most beautiful and spiritually rich texts, including The Gospel According to...
In this holiday-themed episode, a sentimental Jacke takes a look at Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), and the creation of Ebeneezer...
Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece The Godfather routinely tops lists of the greatest films ever made - and when it doesn't, it's often beca...
How well can we know someone through the objects they encountered? In this episode, Jacke talks to Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research fello...
In 1949, American critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the New Yorker, was quick to recognize the achievement of George Orwell's new novel. "[...
Did you think we already knew everything there was to know about Virginia Woolf? Think again! In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar and ed...
At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but he p...
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was born into relative obscurity and died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 29. And yet, somehow thi...
When Jacke started the podcast in 2015, he decided to privilege books that were at least fifty years old. (Longtime listeners will know he's...