You may have read The Scarlet Letter in high school, but have you ever read The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne’s scathing fictional account of a New England utopian community gone wrong? Or Leif Unger’s lyrical Peace Like a River, which, as Scalia argues, offers profound insights on what it means to be a man?

Come join us for a “fireside chat” with AEI Senior Fellow Christopher Scalia as he serves up a baker’s dozen of outstanding and often overlooked English and American novels—novels with rich moral, cultural, and social lessons for our own troubled times.

Christopher J. Scalia is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on literature, culture, and higher education.

His most recent book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), is, in the words of Russell Kirk Center President (and former Thomas More College President) Jeffrey O. Nelson, “a reliable guide to younger readers, suspicious and wearied of politicized works of culture, exhorting them to reclaim their patrimony by making great literature central to their intellectual formation.”

A former English professor, Dr. Scalia specialized in 18th-century and early 19th-century British literature. His articles, essays, and reviews on literature, music, higher education, and other topics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, National Review, First Things, the Times Literary Supplement, and FoxNews.com, among other outlets.

Dr. Scalia is the coeditor of On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (2019) and Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (2017).