Slate Magazine - Highbrow, The

Dissecting the real Wizard of Oz.

Meghan O'Rourke — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:21:09 EST

In 1900, a 44-year-old L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and became the father of the American fairy tale. The book was a commercial and critical success. The story of the orphaned Dorothy Gale, whisked by a tornado away from gray, impoverished Kansas to the magical land of Oz, captured the hearts of children and adults who had lived through an economic crisis but saw all around them the thrum of invention and change. As a young country abuzz with "progress," the United States needed a different kind of fairy tale. A truly American myth could not merely invoke Celtic wraiths or Bavarian dark forest goblins. It would have to include the drive to innovate that launched the Gilded Age and made America the archetypal modern industrial nation during the very decades when Baum's imagination was formed.

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Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love.

Meghan O'Rourke — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:44:55 EST

After the free-love ardor of the 1960s sexual revolution cooled down, a brave new vision of marriage emerged from its ashes. This has come to be known as "companionate marriage." In such a partnership, spouses have a mutual interest in career and home, and share in raising children. They talk over dinner, take turns doing dishes, fret together over the children's schooling, and arrange the occasional date night. To many Americans, the Obamas' recent studiously scheduled outing together would represent the apogee of a successful equitable marriage. To Cristina Nehring, author of the ambitious polemic A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century, one suspects, it would represent all that is wrong with marriage today.

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Assessing the new poet laureate.

Meghan O'Rourke — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:26:55 EST

Kay Ryan, who has just been named America's new poet laureate, is a miniaturist. She favors compression the way Walt Whitman favored expansion. Like oysters, she has said, her poems take shape around "an aggravation." They are also small (most are only about 20 lines long), rich, and dense. A single one might not always make a meal, but a well-selected plate will satiate most readers.

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Anne of Green Gables at 100.

Meghan O'Rourke — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 15:27:28 EST

One hundred years ago, L.M. Montgomery did for women's imaginative lives what Susan B. Anthony did for women's political lives by publishing Anne of Green Gables, the story of an outspoken red-haired orphan growing up on Canada's Prince Edward Island. The book immediately broke through commercially and artistically, selling some 19,000 copies in five months, leading even the cranky dean of American letters, Mark Twain, to pronounce Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." Today, Anne of Green Gables and its seven sequels are the basis for a small industry. More than 50 million editions of the first volume are in print around the world. The books have spun off movies, musicals, miniseries, and an assortment of bric-a-brac, from tea sets to light switches. But perhaps the greatest tribute to Anne's enduring vitality is the decision by the solemn eminences who edit the Modern Library to issue and heavily promote a centennial edition of the first volume in the series. Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, meet L.M. Montgomery and Anne Shirley.

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The Miley Cyrus controversy.

Meghan O'Rourke — Thu, 8 May 2008 17:46:43 EST

Call me insensitive, but I didn't think that the supposedly "racy" photo of 'tween star Miley Cyrus holding a bedsheet around her bare torso was as outré as all the fuss made it out to be. Sure, Cyrus' hair is tousled in a sexual way, and she is, technically, topless. But from a less alarmist perspective, the photograph is—as Annie Leibovitz described it—highly classical. It focuses on the contrast between Cyrus' alabaster skin and dark hair, and it captures, in her vulnerable yet adult gaze, the strangeness of the transitional period known as adolescence. To be 15 is to be no longer a child, even if you are not yet an adult.

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