Literature

It's been four years now since our last encounter with Robert Langdon, the be-tweeded hero who has Da Vinci'd and Demon-ed his way through three previous Dan Brown page-rippers. Brown's last book, " The Lost Symbol ," came out in 2009, smack in the vortex of a Brownado — a whirling era of "Da Vinci Code" European tour packages and Tom Hanks's second cinematic turn as the lank-haired Harvard symbologist. "The Lost Symbol" seemed of the moment and of particularly heightened American interest, set as it was in D.C. Tuesday marks...

Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours" and other works, was artist-in-residence recently at the University of Maryland at College Park. Here is part of a conversation he had with reporter Valerie Strauss about young people and literature: Q) How do you teach young people to love literature? A) I think helping kids to learn to love literature is not all that different from helping someone you are dating learn to love you. Which is not to be a drag or a burden, or sort of an irritating obligation.

When another inmate was hassling Justice Green recently, Green didn't hit him. Instead, he tossed him the 19th-century Russian literature story he was reading at the time and said: Come back to me in a week after you've read this. Something strange is happening at Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center. Residents are so eager to get into a Russian literature class led by the University of Virginia that prison officials use it as a reward. The youths are clamoring to read weighty books such as "War and Peace"...

Don Kleine, 82, who taught English literature at the University of Maryland for four decades, died March 31 at the Specialty Hospital of Washington's Capitol Hill campus. The Silver Spring resident had kidney failure, said his wife, Julaine Kleine. Dr. Kleine joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1967 and retired in 2006. His specialities included modern literature. Donald William Kleine was born in Chicago. He received a bachelor's degree in 1951 and a master's degree in 1953, both in English and both from the University of...

Literature "The Canterbury Tales," by Geoffrey Chaucer "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald "As I Lay Dying," by William Faulkner Informational Texts "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine The Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson "Declaration of Sentiments," by the Seneca Falls Conference "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences," by John Allen Paulos "Working Knowledge: Electronic...

If there is any fear that the fast-moving world of the Internet and the iPhone has destroyed our powers of concentration, or our ability to think lucidly and beautifully, or to create surprising and powerful designs from philosophical concerns, that fear will be put to rest by Marilynne Robinson's new book of elegant essays . The essay form provides us with a place to muse, question and consider. It's both deeply intimate and openly public, a place for the most private ponderings and a...

This summer, a mildewed, cream-colored copy of a 45-year-old novel saved me from a whopping midcareer crisis. My decade of devotion to teaching high school literature -- years that brought me an intense sense of professional reward, much more so than my previous 10 years as a college instructor -- was in peril. But Bel Kaufman's "Up the Down Staircase," a 1964 portrait of a 20-something English teacher striving to bring literary passion to the students crowding her New York City public school classroom, came to the...

The enduring popularity of the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the remarkable phenomena of American literature. Published over about a decade beginning in 1932 — when the author was 65 years old — the books draw upon her own experience as the daughter of intrepid pioneer settlers of the Midwest and West. They create a portrait of the American frontier that has endeared itself to readers not merely here but around the world. Part-memoir, part-fiction, the "Little House in...

Italian 1,642 students 305 teachers French literature 2,068 students 478 teachers Latin literature 3,771 students 573 teachers Computer science AB 5,064 students 1,163 teachers SOURCE: College Board

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea delivered its most in-depth account yet of the case against a Korean-American sentenced to 15 years' hard labor, accusing him late Thursday of smuggling in inflammatory literature and trying to establish a base for anti-Pyongyang activities at a border city hotel. Still, the long list of allegations included no statement from Kenneth Bae, other than claims that he confessed and didn't want an attorney present during his sentencing last week for what...

R ene S. Taube, 93, a retired professor of German literature at Howard University, died Feb. 19 at an Eden Homes nursing facility in Silver Spring. He had dementia, said his son Marcel Taube. Dr. Taube joined Howard's German department in 1969 and retired in 1974. Earlier in his career, he taught German literature at the University at Buffalo. Rene Simon Taube was born in Vienna to a family of partial Jewish heritage that fled to Ecuador after Hitler's rise to power. In 1948, he received a doctorate in...

For so long as I can remember, Washington has suffered from a bad literary rap. Its literature is assumed to consist of ephemeral books by journalists about ephemeral events, ephemeral hack novels about ephemeral melodramas on Capitol Hill and at the CIA, and ephemeral, not to mention unreadable, presidential memoirs. Well, over the years this city has managed to produce plenty of those, but as the accompanying list of suggested reading makes plain, it has also inspired work of quality, variety and, in some cases, genuine...

As a recently retired high school teacher with 43 years of experience in social studies and English, I agree with Sandra Stotsky [ "New school lit standards make teachers smolder," front page, Dec. 3] that studying literature is the best way to prepare young people for college and work and that young-adult literature is contributing to the decline in reading — as is, I would add, too much screen time.  Obviously, nonfiction is important, and most nonfiction assigned to students should be part of...

The Dec. 3 front-page article " New school lit standards make teachers smolder " ignited full-blown rage among my fellow educators and me. When are the nation's youth ever going to be exposed to the finest writers if not in high school English classes? Graduates tell me they remember the discovery of Harper Lee's " To Kill a Mockingbird ," Lorraine Hansberry's " A Raisin in the Sun " and William Shakespeare's " Romeo and Juliet " as defining moments in their lifelong habits of reading and writing.

Ray Heffner, who was president of Brown University during the tumultuous late 1960s, died of cancer Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Coralville, Iowa. He was 87. His wife, the former Ruth Kline, confirmed the death. Dr. Heffner began his teaching career at Indiana University in 1954 and held academic and administrative positions there and at the University of Iowa before being hired at Brown in 1966 as the Ivy League university's 13th president. He served three difficult years in the job....

Audrey Foote, an educator, translator and ardent feminist who reviewed dozens of books, most about powerful women in history, for The Washington Post and other newspapers, died April 3 at her home in the District. She was 85. She had Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer, said her husband, author and journalist Timothy Foote. Dr. Foote's intellectual pursuits often centered around her feminist beliefs. She preferred to use wit over outrage to make her point. In one 1977 essay in the Atlantic magazine, she wrote about how...

Regarding Ron Charles's March 8 Outlook article, " On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats ," on college students not reading radical literature: I was offended by his depiction of all of us college students as superficial idiots "narcotized" by popular culture. That many college students read books such as "Twilight" does not mean many of us do not read more intellectually stimulating literature as well. In addition, many college students today do not read literature because there is little that could shock our parents, who have...

Literature "The Canterbury Tales," by Geoffrey Chaucer "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald "As I Lay Dying," by William Faulkner Informational Texts "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine The Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson "Declaration of Sentiments," by the Seneca Falls Conference "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences," by John Allen Paulos "Working Knowledge: Electronic...

Bombs, bonobos and a bird-legged witch figure prominently in this year's finalists for the National Book Award for young people's literature, which will be announced on Nov. 14. Absent-minded physicists emerge as heroes and genial chemists as spies in Bomb: The Race to Build — and Steal — the World's Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Brook, $19.99, age 10 and up). The stakes are high, indeed, in this fast-paced thriller that happens to be fascinatingly true. Who will be the first to create the atomic...