The image of Emily Dickinson is so familiar as to be iconic: the reclusive poet, sequestered and alone, always dressed in white and writing lines of beguiling complexity from the desk in her bedroom in Amherst. But as made clear in an exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City—which this volume accompanies—the reality is quite different: Dickinson was connected through the links of family, acquaintance, correspondence, and literary influence to a network of readers who struggled to understand—and often, to constrain—her unique poetic voice.

Is Donald Trump an anomaly in American political history? Or is he the newest (and perhaps most technologically advanced) expression of a long-standing theme in the American political tradition—the theme of authoritarianism.