Steven Biel is executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. His books include American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (Norton, 2005) and Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (Norton, 1996).
Steven Biel
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Writing on Public Books
B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms …
B-Sides: Gustav Hasford’s “The Short-Timers”
The most persistent source of anguish in war stories may be the inability to tell them: the sense of a vast experiential and moral distance between the battlefield …
