Algis Valiunas
Fellow
Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
A literary essayist, his writings have appeared in Commentary, the Weekly Standard, National Review, First Things, the American Spectator, the New Criterion, and the Claremont Review of Books. They have also appeared in various collections, including most recently The Best Spiritual Writing, 2013 (Penguin, 2012). He is also the author of the book Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Encounter, 2002). He holds degrees from Dartmouth College; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the University of Chicago, where Saul Bellow was his doctoral dissertation adviser in the Committee on Social Thought.
The Sun Also Rises at 100
Algis Valiunas
The Hemingway style—terse, direct, formidable, in both prose and personal deportment—dominated American literature and the native ideal of manliness for…
Articles
First Things / July 28, 2026
The Priests of High Art
Algis Valiunas
Novelists, playwrights, and historians, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896 and 1830–1870) were also the supreme chroniclers of the Parisian…
Articles
First Things / July 6, 2026
Because It’s There
Algis Valiunas
In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, the Enlightenment champion Lodovico Settembrini and the Jesuit communist Leo Naphta argue about nearly…
Articles
First Things / June 29, 2026
Jonathan Swift’s Savage Indignation
Algis Valiunas
The great themes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the masterpiece whose tricentenary this is, are an elaborate and pungent meditation on…
Articles
First Things / June 23, 2026
Stevenson’s Treasure
Algis Valiunas
Storyteller:The Life of Robert Louis Stevensonby Leo DamroschYale University, 584 pages, $35 Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head…
Articles
First Things / January 21, 2026
Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage
Algis Valiunas
People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter, luxurious—furnished with creature…
Articles
First Things / November 25, 2025
Franz Kafka’s The Trial at 100
Algis Valiunas
In the midst of the centenary celebration of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the publication of The Great Gatsby, it is easy for bookish…
Articles
National Review Online / October 30, 2025
Night of the World
Algis Valiunas
Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the…
Articles
First Things / November 27, 2024
Calamity, Catastrophe, Cataclysm
Algis Valiunas
Euripides at war.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books / August 30, 2024
Arabian Knight
Algis Valiunas
In the literature of the First World War, full of the horrors of trench warfare that ravaged a generation even…
Articles
First Things / May 1, 2024