Let's write about Jeffrey Epstein's twisted life. The more we know the worse his legacy gets and drags down Donald Trump with him

In my opinion, Jeffrey Epstein died a convenient death on August 110, 2019, in a Manhattan jail cell.  I will never be completely convinced about his death being a suicide by hanging.  Nevertheless, he died before being forced, under oath, to tell the truth about his dealing with Donald Trump.

Although I heard the seamy stories about Jeffrey Epstein, it wasn't until I read the excellent Geffrey Berman's book, Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department (2022) a memoir by former SDNY Attorney, that I paid serious attention to this sex monster. 

In two chapters, Berman describes the experience trying to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein before Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr fired him while the case was being investigated to go to trial.

Jeffrey Epstein and his good friend Donald J. Trump

To Mr. Berman's credit, I recall the summary paragraph he wrote about losing his chance to prosecute Epstein.  He reached out to the victims, the young girls who were recruited for sex trafficking by Epstein and his network. Berman hoped they would eventually find justice.

Then I tried to read "The Spider: Inside the Tangled Web of Jeffrey Epstein", by Barry Levine. Frankly, when I got to the abuse stories told by the victims in their recorded public testimonies, I simply could not continue reading, because the pornographic content described was sickening.

Then I read The Atlantic essay by Graeme Wood, "What Jeffrey Epstein Didn't Understand about Lolita".  In a round about way, Wood describes how Jeffrey Epstein created his own myth, personalizing or internalizing the practice of lusting after young girls, like the main character in the novel Lolita. But, in reality, Graeme Wood reveals, the character in the novel was not anyone Epstein would want to be associated with. But, Epstein and the book's protagonist Humbert Humbert, created by author Vladimir Nabokov, had one thing in common. They both lived a life of lies and died as a result of their vile behaviors. 

In the essay, "The Devil Himself", pulished in the New York Review of Books, the life of Epstein is exposed like he was just another New York business tycoon doing deals and charity work. Epstein's pornographic behavior become normalized in the course of his daily life. In fact, I suspect Epstein and his network with Ghislaine Maxwell, became completely oblivious to their sinful dealings. Nevertheless, Epstein seemed to used thinly veiled code words for his sexual experiences. In fact, the pseudonyms for certain activities, like using "toys" and slightly off color comments might have appeared harmless, unless a researcher like Anne Enright knew what to look for. So, what was a day in the life of sex offender and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein really like❓

"The Devil Himself" by Anne Enright is an article in the March 26, 2026, issue of The New York Review of Books. It analyzes a single day of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to reveal details about his enablers, social circle, and the mundane yet disturbing nature of his, and his associates', daily interactions.

At first I am afraid to enter the library. I have arrived at the US Department of Justice website because my attention got snagged by a random post on Bluesky, or possibly X, and I want to see whether it is real. The post showed an email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a correspondent whose name has been redacted, which Epstein begins:

[redacted] said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. and he helped save her life. Whoops.

The reply reads, “You should dress up as him when you see her.” “Of course,” Epstein quips. “The OH jesus Im coming trick.”

If Epstein were an ordinarily unpleasant man, this fragment would have been read once by the two people involved and abandoned as not worth deleting. No one would post it online so I could look at it in revulsion, wondering whether the person discussed had been one of his victims. Nor would anyone notice how a woman mocked for her naiveté is immediately described as a faker and purveyor of “tricks.” There is, on deeper scrutiny, very little about the exchange that is not odd. The woman’s belief that she was watched over brings to mind the rumor of Epstein’s surveillance cameras. God’s presence “next to her when she was in bed” makes us think of Epstein in the same position and of Steve Bannon asking him, in a taped interview, “Do you think you’re the Devil himself❓” The image of a woman’s life saved by faith is replaced by one of a life destroyed.

While I stare at the disordered capitalization of “OH” and the blank space before “Whoops,” other people arrive at the library in order to cross-reference and make legible the black oblongs of the two redacted names. It is not publicly known how many people have used the search function here. We can assume the FBI, or its AI, has “read” all 3.5 million files the library holds, but since their release, compassing them has become the work of some maddened hive mind.

The website feels both official and illicit. I click to say that I am over eighteen. I can’t remember what I wanted to find out, consider the white gap of the search bar, and type in the word “girl.” The second item in the search is a legal brief written by the Manhattan district attorney that seems to be about Epstein’s status as a sex offender. It contains fifteen pages of statements from girls who provided massages to Epstein in Palm Beach. “Defendant asked if [redacted] liked that, and she said she did not.” The girls’ ages were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; they were served dinner by his personal chef, driven by his “houseman,” and “on some occasions” paid to have sex with his “female friend.” Epstein often masturbated in the presence of girls; like Harvey Weinstein, he was described as having an oddly shaped penis, one that was “deformed” when erect.

In an email thread on March 2 and 3, 2015, two women, Lesley and Amanda, discuss a request made by another, Eva (I later see this was Eva Dubin, a former girlfriend of Epstein’s), for an apartment needed by a “swedish girl” for ten days. Lesley says they can “accommodate this girl” in 11B, but “she will need to move to 8A…after the girl currently in there moves in the morning.” I wonder at the women’s cheery competency and how they sound so willing and nice.

On the second page of results for “girl” is an undated, context-free series of one hundred screenshots from pornography sites, one of which is called “Dirty Teen Clips.” Despite the black squares and rectangles placed over their faces, genitals, and chests, the girls’ lack of sexual development can be seen and assessed. The viewer’s focus is so skewed and intensified by the blocky redactions that I wonder whether they make the images not just seedier but also more pornographic. I have no idea how to answer this question but have no doubt that there are men in the same online space as me who are reading these files in order to become aroused. I feel it was a mistake to search for the word “girl.”

Most of the pages in the library are oddly dull, but even the most banal of Epstein’s communications seem to contain the whole story, now that we know what that story was. I wonder if I focus on a single day of Epstein’s life, perhaps the day he wrote the “OH jesus Im coming” email, I might capture the feeling of normalized perversion that I sense in his demotic, automated “Sorry for all the typos” tone. I decide to spend one day with him, to look at twenty-four hours of his correspondence, and then go offline.

On Tuesday, July 19, 2011, Epstein flew to his island Little St. James, in the Caribbean, with plans to return late on Wednesday the 20th. From first-class commercial flights booked the previous day we can guess that he traveled with an assistant, Sarah Kellen, who brought “fabric samples” for the house décor. 

It was two years since his release from jail in Florida, and five months after the Daily Mail published a widely read interview with Virginia Giuffre, who said that Epstein had introduced her to the then Prince Andrew when she was seventeen.

In the files, July 19, 2011, starts at midnight. Epstein is in his New York mansion, dealing with the builders on Little St. James who had made him furious the day before with a bad wall. (“We have discussed this over and over„ it is crazy.”) He asks for photos that he finds “even more confusing” when they arrive. There is a problem with night-lights. His island manager Brice Gordon suggests they focus them “more downward,” but Epstein snaps back, “not even close.” An invoice for plants from a landscape gardener is rejected because it is higher than a quote received in February: “Give her 25k for these.”

Epstein peppers his construction woes with quick, bleating inquiries to two or perhaps three redacted recipients: “Where are you two,” “call me,” “where are you?” At 12:55 AM he sends a cozy invitation to Jes Staley, then a chief executive at JP Morgan, of which he was a major client: “terje , will download his entire un security council presentation on the middle east to me one night next week,, want to come?” He is referring to the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, who along with his wife, Mona Juul, was instrumental in negotiating the 1993 Oslo Accords. These people have since withdrawn from public life, though only Staley has had allegations of rape (which he denies) aired in the press. At this point, I pause to consider that July 19, 2011, was not a special day in Epstein’s life, and that it is still not yet 1:00 AM.

Epstein’s personal plane will leave Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at 7:30 AM. Two hours before dawn, at 3:40 AM, his swatch-wielding assistant confirms that their commercial flights have been canceled. He is in the air when his brother replies to a picture sent the previous day: “Do I have to bail you out again?” The photo sent by Epstein is not available in the library, but from the response we can guess that it shows a woman who is, or looks, underage. Mark Epstein will joke about his brother’s conviction again the following March when Jeffrey tells him he is in “Paris with woody allen.” Mark quips, “For les pedophile convention?” Jeffrey counters, “i think pedophilee is the plural,” to which his brother responds, “Lol.”

Epstein may see his brother’s bail joke as the plane lands at St. Thomas Airport. At 11:17 AM he sends his first email of the office day: “Get a schmooze time from woodys asst.”

These bantering, randomly selected emails seem to show that Epstein wasn’t depraved, corrupt, or dodgy some of the time. He was depraved, corrupt, and proud of it all day long.

While he is in the air and throughout the day Epstein’s brightly facilitating female staff, Lesley, Sarah, Ann, and Lyn, among others, sort out his busy schedule. The correspondence weaves back and forth: “Will there be coffee❓” “He will most definitely have coffee.” (Yuk❗....so bizarrely normal..... these guys were all up to no good.)

Given the reputational damage people suffer from even a glancing association with Epstein, it seems unfair to list all the names mentioned on one day in July 2011, so I search elsewhere in the library to see who meets him multiple times. A computer scientist and writer sought out by Epstein and invited to breakfast on Thursday is rescheduled twice and ends up in Teterboro Airport the next evening, in part because Epstein wants to wait till after midnight to cross into New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they do not appear to meet again. A woman introduced to Epstein by the hedge fund manager Tancredi Marchiolo (who also sends a photo of “irina, valeria and masha”) finds that she has to fly unexpectedly to LA. Despite a nervy, jet-setting series of messages, they connect only fleetingly and her name disappears from the library.

“Heidi” will bring her father along on Thursday at 11:00, which makes me pause to consider the role of family relationships in Epstein’s social circle; to outsiders they may look disordered, but perhaps they felt dynastic and protective to those involved. Epstein left a lot of money in his will to his friends’ children, and it is possible they made him feel sentimental. An early August dinner is penciled in with Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi; the billionaire Leon Black wants a phone call. Sunday dinner will be with David Mitchell, a real estate investor who in 2019, offered, along with Mark Epstein, to post a bond for Jeffrey after his arrest.

Personal emails happen in a cluster at lunchtime. Epstein sends a YouTube video (the link long dead) and is answered, “Haha You and your little butter spray!!” Ghislaine Maxwell forwards him details of a Hawker jet for sale in case it catches his interest at $950,000. He considers a bill for plastering the island’s pool.

Epstein also chats by email with a female academic who has thanked him for “the lift.” (The subject heading is “727.”) She sends a YouTube video and writes, “Even if you can’t (and shouldn’t) live out all your fantasies, you’ll always have this one.” The word “fantasies” and the idea that the lost video might have been obscene stops me (and possibly Epstein, at the time) from seeing that “shouldn’t” is the key word in this flirt-and-run line. Epstein promptly chases with the offer of a haircut at Frédéric Fekkai (no less), “my treat, call my sec if you feel comfortable to accept.” Epstein was skillful at faintly criticizing a beautiful woman’s looks and then offering to fix the flaw with surgery or, in this case, a haircut. (What I linger over is his almost therapeutic use of the word “comfortable” here.) His canny target is neither insecure nor vain enough to accept, though she frames the rejection as self-criticism. Her problem, she writes, isn’t getting a haircut but “maintaining it. I am a hopeless investment in that sense.”

Midafternoon a woman sends a lovely note to thank Epstein for his donation to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, whose help researching the TNF-alpha blocking medicine “helps me so much today.” There are a few bits and pieces with his financial people. “Did we give Mthe laptop” he asks his accountant, Richard Kahn, who has been chasing receipts on Epstein’s behalf earlier in the day. At 4:39 Epstein responds to a request to call a man named James Condren, and they agree to speak at 5:15. Nine minutes later Jes Staley wants Epstein to know that “He is available on his cell for the next hour and then off to Asia.”

The “then off to Asia” line makes me irritated for no reason. There are forty-eight countries in Asia. Is he talking about a market or a place? Is Staley going rubber-tubing in Laos, or has he been tempted back to tiffin in Raffles of Singapore? In fact, this sequence of calls is part of a move within JP Morgan to “exit” Epstein as a client. James Condren is one of their company lawyers, and he will report the content of the call to a circle of his colleagues, which includes Epstein’s friend Staley (perhaps tucking his passport into a jacket pocket as his email arrives): “I just conveyed to Mr. Epstein our response to his proposal to settle his High Grade Fund and Bear stock claims together for $21 million.” After midnight Stephen Cutler, the firm’s general counsel, sends a group reply: “This is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.”

The next email Epstein writes is the one that first set me looking at this single day in July: “[redacted] said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. and he helped save her life. Whoops.” Given all that preceded it, the email seems almost harmless: a small insight into a mutual acquaintance, a shared joke, a brief moment of human contact.

After dinner there is a message from an enthusiastic person with poor English—“I was wondering if you re-saved my email”—who is coming to NYC and wants a chance to “hug” him. His pilot Larry talks about repairs to the rear strut of a Mercedes and confirms that he also sent Epstein a bill for his daughter’s college fees: “Yes sir, it is a new request for Taylor’s tuition at Syracuse for fall session.” (In 2017 his daughter got married at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. Three days after Epstein was found dead in his prison cell, her wedding photographs were purloined and published by the Daily Mail.)

Late in the evening, Epstein picks up on a chain started earlier in the day by Boris Nikolic, a senior adviser to Bill Gates. On the previous Sunday, Boris had written to Epstein that he wanted to contact Staley’s brother, Peter, who became a leading AIDS activist after his own diagnosis in 1985: “I do need to talk to his brother few things,” Boris wrote, “including ACT UP for African epidemics. Also there is another issue (do not mention this)—I need to get David Geffen to a dinner with Bill. Will invite you and Jes as well—but need to get to Geffen first.” The thread seems to sum up how Epstein’s cohort used the goodness of others (and perhaps the love Jes Staley had for his brother) as powerful means of leverage.

“I am getting to geffen,,,” Epstein writes on the 19th. (There are no signs that he ever did, in fact, “get to” the billionaire Hollywood producer David Geffen.) “Your jon [job] is to tell dick to be extra nice to jes,, they have traded calls.” By “dick” he is referring to Richard Henriques, the CFO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and when Boris replies, “with bill at think tank all day,” he is talking about the AfricaSan conference, at which the foundation announced a significant expansion of their sanitation program for the world’s poor.

Something happened on my fourth or fifth time looking at the email about “gods presence next to her when she was in bed”: the redaction was thin enough to guess at the letters of the email address. It looked like a name, “Habla” or maybe “Nadia,” followed by four numbers. Perhaps thirty seconds after discerning this, I had the address of Nadia Marcinko, which matched it perfectly: Nadja2102@yahoo.com. Marcinko, I discovered, is a trained pilot and model, and a named co-conspirator in the Palm Beach case of 2008, in the course of which she was accused by a victim of engaging in sexual acts with an underage girl, with or for Epstein, sometimes using sex toys.

Her correspondence with him started in 2004, and in 2005 a flight she takes from Slovakia was discussed in an exchange that mentioned “Eva” and “JeanLuc.” (Jean-Luc Brunel is an alleged trafficker.) Epstein expected her to “play” or “watch” him with other girls, and she promised she would “try to find girls” whenever they were in New York. In May 2006, she wrote, “I would leave now but I am giving the little girl a modelling lesson in her bikini tomorrow ;-),” and he replied, “i miss you and love you now…” By 2009, they were bickering like a couple on the verge of a breakup: “you were dressed in a disgusting t shirt and jeans, the dinner was disgusting , inelegant, badly presented laughable. and totally your doing. its that simple.” In 2010, she spat back, “You need professional help,” but she continued to be dependent on him. “Jeffrey, please, I just need answers regarding my apartment, money, car.”

Nadia wrote that she loved him too much to be just a friend, but by 2011, when he wrote to her about “jesus,” they had reached some kind of equilibrium. Later that year she discussed his Christmas present with his assistant Sarah, asking whether a bowl made from a human skull is “too much?” to which Sarah answers, “Never too much with JE. He loves that shit.” As public pressure mounted on Epstein, Nadia bonded with him over his treatment in the press, but she also demanded compensation for the “lost opportunities and humiliating consequences” she would have to deal with “forever.”

In 2018, she told him that she wanted to freeze her eggs and he replied, “ill pay.” He also asked after her girlfriend: “Girlfriend is good, brings me flowers & wants to try a sex party on Sat.” In 2019 she wrote, “just finished therapy…very interesting” and he responded, “where is my birthday video❓”

I find it hard to suppress a sense of melancholy about all of this. Then, I look at an exchange with Epstein from 2015: “I wasn’t planning to fly with him tmrw,” she wrote, “but if toys are involved, I may reconsider.” Epstein answered: “toys always available.” Later, when Epstein has to cancel, a redacted name responds, “Ok. I’ll stick with swiping for local toys.” I don’t know how someone might “swipe” for a toy. Perhaps I am naive, but it sounds more like a gesture made on a dating app. It occurs to me that “toys” here may be code for human beings. At this point I know it is time to get out of the library, confident in the knowledge that every abused, hurt, or simply poor and indebted person on the planet has another place online where they can have their worst fears confirmed.

July 19 winds down with a chat about the return flight with Larry, the pilot. But the night is not over for Epstein, who through the small hours talks with his staff about whether a stair runner he saw in Paris can be installed in the New York house. The emails roll into Wednesday: “You ok?” “are you awake?” “Where are you?” “She’ll be there at 8 am.” “I just landed in Ibiza with Prince!” Ghislaine Maxwell sends her latest travel itinerary: “Going toB st t and then mallorca rome sardinia lond Mustique barbados miami boston ny.” In the afternoon Epstein sends an appeal to the journalist Michael Wolff about Tina Brown, then the editor of the Daily Beast: “tina has asked Wayne Barrett to do an investgative piece. ? how do i appease her. this is crazy.” Wolff replies, “Let me think about Tina, she seems to have it in for you and there are lots of way to neutralize her.”

Turns out, there weren’t.

Let's Write about how evil Donald Trump is erasing history with executive orders

Franco-American History is being erased in Lowell, Massachusetts

Statue in Lowell MA, honors women who staffed the early mills.
On the Road author Jack Kerouac's mother was a Lowell mill worker. 

Videos about exploited 19th-century mill workers- most of them were French-Canadian immigrants, have been removed from Lowell National Historical Park following President Trump’s executive order. By Renée Loth Contributor, Updated March 6, 2026

The following things happened in Lowell in the 19th century: Girls as young as 10 worked 12-hour days, six days a week, in hot, unhealthy textile mills with little ventilation. The harsh conditions led the mill workers to organize the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which pushed for a 10-hour work day. Its newspaper, The Voice of Industry, took strong stands against war and slavery, and many workers stood in solidarity with the enslaved Africans who harvested the cotton spun in those very mills.

Apparently Donald Trump doesn’t want you to know about all of this, because in accordance with his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” two videos about the mill workers shown at the Lowell National Historical Park have been removed.

“Lowell: The Continuing Revolution” is one of the two missing films (still available online if not on the park website). It’s a standard overview of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, mostly supporting the narrative of benevolent mill owners and young women happy to be liberated from farm drudgery to earn their own money. But the film does describe the air in the mills as “swarming with lint, leaving the workers susceptible to lung disease,” and says that owners looking to optimize profits regularly cut wages, leading to strikes. 

Since the US Interior Department’s directives enforcing Trump’s order compel the National Park Service to “flag for removal” any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” the educational videos had to go.

“Every American should be alarmed that this is happening,” said Kristin Sykes, Northeast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent guardian of the parks. “We’re just starting to see this whitewashing, and we could see much more.”

The association is among the plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit filed by the group Democracy Forward in federal district court in Boston, challenging Trump’s authority to alter American history by executive fiat. Advocates worry that cultural institutions will begin to self-censor in order to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. 

In a recent visit to the park, Sykes said a guide told her the films were being “updated.”  The expunged videos in Lowell are just part of a sweeping attack on the country’s cultural heritage, targeting stories about slavery, civil rights, climate change, and anything else disliked by this president. The range of threatened material is breathtaking, including 80 items at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. A rainbow flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, which commemorates the struggle for LGBTQ rights. In Maine, signs about climate change and Native American rights were removed from Acadia National Park. Not even gift shop items are exempt.

A separate order required that QR codes be installed at national historic sites, encouraging visitors to report any “negative” material they might perceive. The idea was to unleash an army of cultural vigilantes seeking out divisive topics to erase from the national memory. But, oops, ❗ most of the initial comments received through the QR code criticized park funding cuts and the administration’s efforts to rewrite history.

The courts have tried to put a stop to some of the more egregious revisionism; in addition to the Democracy Forward suit, last month a federal judge ruled that a dismantled panel discussing the nine enslaved people at George Washington’s home at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia must be restored. The judge, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, quoted George Orwell’s dystopian “1984” and said Trump did not have the right to “disassemble historical truths.”

Why does it matter if a couple of videos about 200-year-old industrial history are removed from the Lowell national park❓

For Robert Forrant, a professor of labor history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the stories are searingly relevant today. “We’re diminishing the history of working people,” he said. And without a shared understanding of labor’s hard-fought rights, he said, “it’s easier to ride roughshod over them.”

Indeed, in his second term Trump has slashed funding for occupational health and safety and equal employment agencies, forced labor department workers into early retirement, and, under the guise of national security, stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. For this administration, the less Americans know about the organized struggle for workers’ rights — including government workers — the better.

Because one thing the evil Trump administration does understand: Knowledge is power.

Let's write about Jeffrey Epstein and his perverted obsession with Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

What Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Understand About Lolita❓

Hint❓...Everything. By Graeme Wood published in The Atlantic.

Anybody who flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private 727 jet he named his "Lolita Express" had to know what they were being exposed to. But Jeffrey Epstein adopted the name anyway because he apparently wanted his comrades in sex trafficking to believe an illusion that they were just enjoying a weird fantasy.

Author of the novel Lolita

But, as Graeme Wood describes in this essay, Jeffrey Epstein would never associate with the low class Humbert Humbert, a fictional French literature professor who was sexually obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores "Lolita" Haze and the narrator of the novel Lolita.

Obviously, Jeffrey Epstein never actually read the novel Lolita, but surely he was obsessed with young girls and likely fantasized using the book as a ruse, because it is considered to be literature (so to speak- like sewerage eventually becomes water., but it is still yucky.)

Geoffrey Berman, former District Attorney for the Second District of New York (SDNY) before Donald Trump fired him, wrote in his book "Holding the Line", about how the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's house was loaded with books and one oddity he was able to disclose is how multiple pairs of reading glasses were found laying on many tables in Epstein's Manhattan house. In other words, Epstein wanted visitors to believe he was a serious reader. (It was a ruse.)

This opinion essay by Graeme Wood is likely the closest The Atlantic has ever gone into publishing pornography, in a literary way, of course. 

One of the minor annoyances of being an incorrigible pervert is that you risk having your own bookshelf testify against you. 

Some spines are better turned inward. A pederast might hide away Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which a middle-aged German author ogles a lithe young Polish boy. 

A hyper-literate rapist should camouflage his copy of A Clockwork Orange with a more consensual dust jacket. It is therefore curious that the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—who died in jail in 2019, while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking minors—flaunted his supposed love of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The book, first published in France in 1955, is so closely identified with pedophilia that it spawned not one but two words, Lolita and nymphet, for girls whom grown men find sexually tempting. Rather than take the obvious advice—Under no circumstances advertise your obsession with Lolita—Epstein apparently did the opposite.

The Epstein files released by Congress include photos of a young woman or girl, with Lolita’s horny opening lines clumsily inscribed on her skin in fine black ink. Lolita crops up here and there in the documents released a few weeks later, too. The journalist Michael Wolff, who was working on a profile about Epstein, wrote that he kept a copy of Lolita, and no other book, on his bedside table. (I believe Berman's account differs from what Wolff disclosed. Berman's investigation documented many books throughout the house)

Wolff added that Epstein “is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov [sic] fan.” When a fact-checker wrote to Epstein to confirm these details, Epstein forwarded the message to Wolff, with a note suggesting that he would not cooperate with the checking process: “nfw,” as in no fucking way. In the end, the profile was never published.

Whether or not he kept a copy by his bed, we know that Epstein owned a first edition and ordered The Annotated Lolita for his Kindle in 2019, 43 days before he was arrested. 

As to the claim that Epstein was a “great Nobokov fan,” the only possible response is: nfw. He may have wanted others to believe he was, and he may also have tried to impress certain people with polite conversation about the book—maybe the kind of people who do not know how to spell Nabokov, or who wanted his money too much to call out his superficiality. 

The novel makes a cameo in his 2018, correspondence with the Harvard English professor Elisa New, wife of the hapless Larry Summers, whose poetry project he funded. “I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita,” New says in an email, seemingly at Epstein’s urging. She then suggests that Epstein read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, writing that Cather’s novel has “similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” The titular girl in Lolita is a 12-year-old who is kidnapped and serially raped by a much older man. To compare Lolita to My Ántonia in this way is a bit like saying Moby-Dick and Deliverance are both stories about fishing trips.

Still, I doubt that Epstein ever read Lolita, or that he understood it if he did. The book’s pleasures are intense but not erotic, and not congruent with Epstein’s essentially philistine taste. Like Nabokov’s great novel Pale Fire, Lolita is about an intelligent writerly type who is not intelligent enough to realize that he is also completely nuts. It accesses levels of pathos that a psycho like Epstein would struggle to appreciate.

We know from his emails that Epstein purchased an eclectic array of nonfiction, including books on finance, power, and sex, plus random books that might endear him to the powerful men in his orbit. These orders were not all lowbrow. He bought Norman Mailer’s fiery but cerebral anti-feminist polemic The Prisoner of Sex and a Don DeLillo novel, Zero K. 

Among the down-market acquisitions he made were installments of the Flashman series—think James Bond, but more bumbling and Victorian—and of The Man From O.R.G.Y., a pulpy 1960s, spy-sex romp for readers who considered Pussy Galore too subtle. 

I found excerpts online: They were so lame and dated that, may God forgive me, I actually felt bad for Epstein. A mega-millionaire is spoiled for company, with outstanding people and experiences available for purchase or rent. To prefer the solitary consumption of a novel with lines like “I was strumming her little passion switch like a banjo player mad with palsy” is beyond pitiful. It shows a simultaneous unfamiliarity with both human sexual response and bluegrass music.

Reading escapist crap now and then does not preclude reading great prose at more serious moments. But, if your literary tastes favor the dashing heroism of a spy, a lover, a man of mystery and intrigue—and I suspect that Epstein could read fiction only in this vicarious way—then Lolita is a comically bad choice. 

Humbert Humbert, the narrator, is unhinged and obtuse. The novel is a joke on him. The actors cast by Hollywood to play Humbert in the two movie adaptations of the novel, James Mason and Jeremy Irons, give a sense of the type: Both are known for playing reptilian creeps, even more grotesquely mismatched for an American tween than the average adult man would be. Humbert is one of the most odious and self-absorbed creations in all of literature. He is a rapist, a murderer, a world-class deflector of blame. (Maine Writer...hmmmm, sounds like Jeffrey Epstein's personal friend,😏 ya'think❓)

(“It was she who seduced me”), and a pompous piece of child-molesting Eurotrash. Come to think of it, that he can express himself so well—with the linguistic ingenuity, come to think of it, of Vladimir Nabokov, is a scandal. 

Much of Lolita's plot follows this continental sophisticate and Lolita as they drive across America in a “jalopy,” shacking up in motels and passing vulgar roadside attractions. (Epstein, by contrast, was too much of a snob to debase himself with terrestrial travel. He flew private, in a 727, known unofficially as the “Lolita Express.”)

In the end of the novel, however, is even more hateful to someone with Epstein’s predilections. Humbert meets his ex-nymphet again when she’s 17. Lolita has grown distant—which is to say, she has grown up—and has sexually emancipated herself from Humbert, though she still wants his money. Now married and pregnant, Lolita has become unattractive to Humbert, and to some extent Humbert has become unattractive to himself, even remorseful about his crimes against her.

To these indignities (the aging of his lover, the seedy motels, the discovery that he is a worm), Humbert adds one more, perhaps the only one with which Epstein could sympathize. At the novel’s end, he refers back to the reason for his writing all of this down in the first place: He is in jail awaiting trial, and these are his notes. Before he can face justice, he will be dead of a heart attack, and Lolita herself will die in childbirth. Note the irony in the plot (a childhood stolen by an adult, and an adulthood lost to a child) and also in the parallel to Epstein, who, like Humbert, cheated justice through an early demise.

Epstein could, I suppose, have seen himself in Humbert, understood Humbert all too well, and simply not regarded him as loathsome. Epstein was, after all, Epstein, and did not inhabit the same moral universe as you and I do. It is a dark thought: Epstein curled up alone under the covers, studying his nightly installment of the novel because he recognized the lust and moral frailty and could not get enough of it. This Humbert fellow—so relatable.🤢 A pompous lecher, "Wow, just like me"❗For that to be the case, Epstein would have needed a capacity for self-deprecation and insight into his own perversity. No evidence for these traits exists.

More likely, Epstein confused Lolita for some kind of Booker Prize–level version of Penthouse Forum, which is a stupid error. The opening lines, the ones written on a female body in the Epstein-file photo, are more autoerotic than erotic, with Humbert self-pleasuring at the thought of his own mouth (“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth”).

Reading Lolita as erotica would be a further irony, because in making that category error, he would have been aligning himself with the book’s early moralist critics. “Highbrow pornography,” The New York Times’ Orville Prescott wrote when the book came out in America, noting that even the French had banned it. I suppose it would be unfair to ding a reviewer in 1958, when smut was scarcer, for seeing pornography in all the wrong places, and mistaking this very unsexy book for titillation.

But, just as the notion that Epstein read and understood Lolita is implausible, the alternative—that he read the novel and got off on it—is almost too gross to contemplate.

But just as the notion that Epstein read and understood Lolita is implausible, the alternative—that he read the novel and got off on it—is almost too gross to contemplate.

To find Lolita sexy would not only mean finding child-rape sexy. It would also mean finding Humbert Humbert sexy. And that is a level of perversion probably beyond even Jeffrey Epstein.

This article appears in the February 2026 print edition of The Atlantic,with the headline “What Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Understand. About Lolita"

P.S. Glad I newer bothered to read Lolita but I appreciate Graeme Wood's timely book review. 

Let's write about the gothic classic novel "Rebecca"!

 One of my favorite mystery novels read when I was a teenager is now available free on Kindle.

Published in Parade by Nina Durwin:

Rebecca! 1938, Book Voted ‘Best Novel of the Century’ is Now Free on Amazon: The gothic masterpiece, once named the best novel of the century, is now free to read on Amazon. 

"Rebecca" was adapted into a now-classic film by director Alfred Hitchcock. IMDb 1940 Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and George Sanders

One of the most enduring novels of the 20th century just became even more accessible. 

English author Daphne du Maurier photographed at her home, circa 1977 . 

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1938, gothic classic, is currently free to read on Amazon for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, giving a new wave of readers the chance to discover or revisit the story that has captivated audiences for generations. 

A 1938, National Book Award-winner and Anthony Award-winner for Best Novel of the Century, Rebecca remains one of literature’s most atmospheric and psychologically gripping works.

The novel follows a young, unnamed narrator who impulsively marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and moves to his grand estate, Manderley. But once inside its sprawling halls, she quickly realizes she is living in the shadow of Maxim’s late first wife, the glamorous and enigmatic Rebecca. Though Rebecca is dead before the story even begins, her presence lingers everywhere: in the house, in the staff, and in Maxim himself. As secrets begin to unravel, du Maurier slowly transforms what first feels like a romantic fairy tale into a tense psychological mystery. Themes of jealousy, identity, class and obsession pulse beneath the novel’s famously eerie prose. Its unforgettable opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” remains one of the most iconic first sentences in literary history. 

The book’s impact only grew when Alfred Hitchcock adapted Rebecca into a film in 1940. Starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, the movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and cemented the story’s place in cinematic history. Hitchcock’s moody, suspense-filled interpretation introduced the tale to an even wider audience and helped define the gothic thriller genre on screen.

More recently, Rebecca experienced something of a cultural revival. Taylor Swift referenced the novel in a recent interview, sparking renewed interest among younger readers who may be discovering du Maurier’s work for the first time. The book’s themes of memory, insecurity and living in someone else’s shadow continue to resonate nearly 90 years after its publication. Now, with the novel available to read for free on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, there’s never been a better time to step inside Manderley’s gates. Just be warned: once you enter, it’s hard to leave.
(Wow, still have a copy of this novel on my book shelf, will make a point to re-read!)

Let's write about George Washington the American farmer who rejected slavery but not during his lifetime

Echo book review published in the New York Review of Books.

Farmer George review by Daniel J. Kevles
Book by Bruce Ragsdale’s Washington at the Plow examines the connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Plow-Founding-Question-Slavery-ebook/dp/B097RYRBWM/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.703jj2-7iwoR9RxnUok0UQ.hxZcWa7HQywZiidRqNcwObdSWCfv5Zs_N2AGPYixBtk&dib_tag=se&keywords=Bruce+Ragsdale%E2%80%99s+Washington+at+the+Plow&qid=1771457537&sr=8-1

“First in war, first in peace,” one of George Washington’s Continental Army generals declaimed in Congress after his death, yet during his lifetime Washington wanted to be known as the new nation’s “first farmer.” Immediately upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary War with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, he resigned his command to resume his work at Mount Vernon, his family home on the western side of the Potomac River in Virginia. Contemporaries likened him to the legendary Roman leader Cincinnatus, who left his farm to repel an invasion, was quickly victorious, then relinquished power to return to the virtues of the plow. Washington gestured to Cincinnatus’s ideal of republican simplicity; according to a good friend, he found in farming “a personal gratification seen nowhere else in his life” other than in his domestic comforts. 

But Mount Vernon, which comprised extensive lands, scores of enslaved people under his control, and a mansion that he expanded to include a great room with Palladian-windowed views down to the Potomac, was far from simple. Neither, as Bruce Ragsdale reveals in the prodigiously researched Washington at the Plow, were his agricultural ambitions.

Those ambitions were striking—the management of his land and laborers to establish an agricultural model that was innovative and sustainable and that would inspire other farmers in building the new nation. Ragsdale, whose previous works include a study of economic development and slavery in Revolutionary Virginia, penetrates more deeply than other biographical accounts of Washington’s agricultural ideas and practices through close examination of the records of the Home House Farm—later called the Mansion House Farm—which surrounded the residence, and the four outlying farms, each a separately named plantation, into which Washington divided the Mount Vernon estate. He finds that the records expose “a curiosity of mind and boldness of imagination that few discerned in other dimensions of [Washington’s] life,” including in the military and presidential periods.

They also provide “the most detailed documentation of his engagement with slavery and his conflicted attitudes toward the institution.” Washington recognized that agricultural change at Mount Vernon depended on teaching his enslaved workers new skills or acquiring workers who already possessed them. The farm records report his encounters with the overseers and enslaved laborers who worked his lands, assessments of their attitudes, measures of their skills, descriptions of their tasks, and judgments of how well or poorly they carried them out. His goal of agricultural improvement drove the way he managed them while adding to the value of his investment in them. What is especially distinctive about Ragsdale’s book is its account of the strong, evolving link between Washington’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his beliefs and expectations concerning his enslaved laborers.

Washington, who had leased Mount Vernon from the estate of his late half-brother Lawrence beginning in 1754, inherited the property on the death of Lawrence’s widow in 1761. He had taken over its management in 1759, on his return from four years of duty as an officer in the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. He was newly married to Martha Custis, the widow of a wealthy planter, who brought a dowry of sizable personal property along with eighty-four enslaved men and women and six thousand acres of land, roughly tripling Washington’s total holdings. While some of the estate was used for raising corn, its major crop was tobacco, which Virginia planters had long grown and sold mostly to British merchants, shipping it down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay and across the Atlantic.

Washington had earlier worked as a surveyor in western Virginia, and his military service had brought him beyond the headwaters of the Potomac (which gather in what is now West Virginia) and across the Appalachian Mountains into what was then informally called the Ohio country. Although only twenty-seven when he began managing Mount Vernon, he possessed far more knowledge and experience of the colony’s western lands than most of his fellow planters, and Ragsdale writes that he “was eager to explore opportunities outside the traditional investments of the colonial Virginia gentry.” He soon envisioned the creation of an agricultural and commercial region that would reach from the transmontane west via the Potomac to the Chesapeake. Once Britain began imposing restrictive mercantilist controls on the colonies, he came to see Virginia and its neighboring colonies as constituting “a rising Empire,” energized by robust agriculture as well as manufacturing enterprises.

Washington assumed that his place in the future would depend on the development of a thriving agricultural enterprise of his own. To that end, he acquired from the Virginia Colony 33,000 acres of land in the Ohio country intending, in accord with Virginia law, to establish homesteads worked by tenants there. He also added substantially to his land holdings at Mount Vernon. In the years before the Revolution the estate came to comprise, including Martha’s lands, about 11,500 acres, some 3,260 of them arable.

Washington, who had picked up the rudiments of farming from Lawrence, involved himself in most of the estate’s operations and rode its expanse daily, a habit that he followed, when he was home, for most of his life. In regular touch with the soil, his managers, and a number of his enslaved workers, he recognized early on that the agricultural potential of his estate as well as of the rest of Virginia was threatened by soil exhaustion, a consequence of the long devotion to tobacco and corn. He sought to pursue a husbandry that would both restore the soil and yield products with markets beyond the mother country.

He turned for guidance to the “New Husbandry”—the methods and approach of the agricultural revolution that by the mid-eighteenth century was taking hold in Britain and spreading to France. Led by the owners of the great estates and their leaseholders, it was suffused with the tenets of the scientific revolution, casting aside ancient authority and practice in favor of empiricism and experimentation. Its advocates promoted new methods of sowing seeds, cultivating crops, and breeding animals, encouraged access to information through personal exchange and local societies, and published journals and treatises.

Washington initially learned of the New Husbandry from fellow gentry in Virginia and tobacco merchants in England, then after independence through correspondence with several of its British advocates. To his sensibility, they expressed an enlightened civic obligation that he considered worthy of emulation by his fellow American estate holders—“gentlemen who have leisure and abilities to devise and wherewithal to hazard something,” as he wrote to an enthusiast of the New Husbandry in Pennsylvania, men who would inspire the common farmer to take to the new agricultural methods. After the Revolution such men formed societies for agricultural improvement in a number of states, and several elected Washington to honorary membership. But while he endorsed their purpose, he refrained from publicly promoting the cause of innovation, preferring to encourage it via private influence and personal example.

Ragsdale writes that Washington acquired and studied a number of treatises on the New Husbandry, but he overlooks the fact that the treatises provided neither consistent nor straightforward instruction. Among those works, two in particular, influential on Washington and others, illustrate the point: Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, new editions of which were published as Washington was taking over the management of Mount Vernon.

Tull, a mechanically resourceful estate owner in Berkshire, had invented a drill for sowing seed at uniform spacing and depth and a horse-drawn hoe for turning the soil while plants were growing. Duhamel, a polymath (knowledge about many fields) and member of the French Academy of Sciences, was distinguished in botany and agronomy. But while both extolled the New Husbandry in principle, they differed sharply on the best practices for pursuing it. Tull contended that finely turning the soil added significantly to its nutrient value and thus did away with the need for manuring and fallowing the land.

Duhamel, while admiring Tull’s sowing and hoeing, marshaled evidence from numerous experiments that without manuring and fallowing, cropland wore out.

In the face of such contradictions, Washington relied on his own resources and judgment. In the late 1760s, he replaced tobacco with wheat as his principal cash crop. 

Wheat would liberate Mount Vernon from dependence on the British market. It could be sold locally or for export as either grain or flour; in 1770 Washington built his own gristmill and soon, in response to Virginia’s requiring strict inspection of all flour for export, registered the brand “G. Washington,” marking it on all casks intended for foreign sale. By itself wheat, too, would deplete the soil; following Duhamel, Washington rotated the planting of it with successive seasons of corn, which he needed to feed his enslaved workers, and fallow. Apparently drawing on Tull, he cultivated wheat with a soil-turning plow but departed from him in applying a covering of manure.

On returning to Mount Vernon in 1783, after an absence of eight and a half years with the Continental Army, Washington resumed riding his farms and soon regretted that he had “continued so long in the ruinous mode of farming, which we are in.” 

Eager to change course, during the remainder of the decade he “put in place his most ambitious plan of farming,” Ragsdale writes.

He learned fresh strategies from recent British treatises—he solicited such works for the rest of his life—and from Arthur Young, Britain’s leading chronicler of the New Husbandry, who regularly sent him his Annals of Agriculture and advised him by correspondence on seeds, livestock, and farming tools. Washington assured him that the Annals would be his “guide.”

Young, doubtless with manure in mind, told him that in England farming succeeded in proportion to the attention given to cattle. Washington, like most American farmers, had been negligent with his livestock, and he resolved to improve them by establishing better meadows. He also constructed a large, functional barn, its design an eclectic joining of specifications from Young, among others, and his own judgment, that included stalls for dairy cows, pens for other livestock, and arrangements for the efficient distribution of feed and removal of dung.

Dung now ranked at the top of his agricultural armamentarium, figuring explicitly in what he wanted in a farm manager: a man deeply knowledgeable about advanced British husbandry who could “above all, Midas like…convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.” Washington built the first repository in the United States—a stercorary—for storing, mixing, and aging his animals’ droppings. Drawing on The Gentleman Farmer by the Scottish lord Henry Home, he devised his own expanded schedule of crop rotation, a seven-year cycle that started with corn and wheat, moved to revitalizing clover and grasses, and proceeded successively to turnips, barley, and pasture.

During his presidency Washington bought a license to install at Mount Vernon a remarkable milling machine that had been invented by the mechanical genius Oliver Evans, had been granted US Patent No. 3 in 1790, and processed grain from the first milling to flour packed in barrels. During his seven presidential years in Philadelphia—the country’s “thriving center of agricultural improvement and scientific inquiry,” Ragsdale reports—he paid close attention to “the practices that made Pennsylvania farming so productive and so distinct from the agriculture of Virginia.” After 1797, in his short postpresidential life, he remained a restless risk taker, devising a new plan for agriculture at Mount Vernon and investing in experimental enterprises and mechanical improvements. One such venture paid off handsomely: a distillery that “quickly became one of the largest producers of whiskey in the nation,” Ragsdale notes, and added substantially to the value of the estate’s grain production.

In the 1760s Washington had begun planting seeds in experimental beds that he eventually incorporated into a botanical garden, aiming “to try their Goodness” and measure the “several Virtues”—“powers,” in the botanical language of the day—of various compost mixtures. He grafted fruit trees onto rootstock and assessed varieties of English cherry, French pear, and walnut trees as well as grapes in the hope of creating a good Virginia wine. In the 1780s, in service of crop rotation and optimal preparation of the soil, he assessed different seeds and plants for how they flourished in various mixtures of soils and dungs, precisely recording experimental measurements as well as virtually every other detail of farming. Ragsdale notes that determining the ideal rate for sowing seeds per acre “became for Washington a quest comparable to his search for the proper sequence of crop rotations.”

Now famous on both sides of the Atlantic, Washington was a salient figure in an international network of agricultural exchange. 

Admirers at home and abroad, including the US ministers in Britain, sent him new plants and seeds as well as improved breeds of cattle and sheep, among them a calf produced by the first bull imported into the US from the herd of Robert Bakewell, the famed British pioneer of modern animal breeding. Particularly prominent in the network was the Marquis de Lafayette, a general of the wartime French forces and a lasting ally, comfortable in requesting Washington’s assistance to obtain seeds from Kentucky for King Louis XVI’s garden and generous in sending him a strong Maltese jackass for the production of mules, as well as two jennies (female asses) for multiplying the breed. Washington, no stranger to animal improvement, bred foxhounds in collaboration with his fellow huntsmen and earned steady stud fees for the services of his fine stallions, noting to his manager that he had “these kind of improvements very much at heart.”

The animal improvement closest to his ambitions, however, centered on mules, the offspring of jackasses and mares. 

Washington greatly valued large mules as draft animals, sterile though they are, ranking them superior to horses for their strength, longevity, and cheaper feeding costs. Powerful jackasses were uncommon in the United States, but he had learned about a Spanish breed during the war. Although Spain prohibited the export of its jackasses, in 1784 King Charles III, eager to curry favor with the new nation, authorized the export of two of them, one of which survived the Atlantic voyage and arrived at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in October 1785.

Newspapers covered its journey to Mount Vernon, one describing it as “the largest Jack Ass I ever saw.” Naming the animal “Royal Gift,” Washington put him to servicing mares, at first with little success, but by the next year, after using a jenny “as an excitement,” he could write, “Royal Gift never fails.” News of Royal Gift’s prowess spread, prompting Maryland planters to send mares and jennies to Mount Vernon for servicing. After Royal Gift’s death in 1796, Washington continued his mule production thanks in part to the Maltese jackass from Lafayette and his own enlarged stock of mares.

Having no counterpart in Britain’s New Husbandry, mule breeding constituted an independent initiative, Washington’s response to American agricultural needs. He explained to Young that he hoped “to secure a race of extraordinary goodness, which will stock the Country,” adding, “Their longevity & cheap keeping will be circumstances much in their favor.”

At the outset of his mule breeding, Washington told Lafayette another of his reasons for propagating the animals: they “are so much more valuable under the care which is usually bestowed on draught animals by our Negroes.” The pros and cons of relying on enslaved labor were never far from Washington’s thoughts on agricultural improvement. Ragsdale emphasizes that all the tasks of his new, innovative order—cultivation, experimentation, use of new tools—had to be “incorporated within a system of supervision and enforcement for which no British agricultural treatise would offer guidance.”

The more Washington expanded his efforts in the New Husbandry, the greater his reliance on enslaved workers, especially, as the enterprise grew more complicated, on those who were brought to Mount Vernon with essential skills or were taught them there. By 1774 Washington had acquired fifty-two additional enslaved hands—by purchase, natural increase, and transfer of some of Martha’s dower slaves—to work his enlarged estate and his western lands, bringing the total to 120 adults. Between 1786 and 1799 the number grew by at least another hundred, to a total of slightly more than three hundred able-bodied adults, children, and the elderly. They planted and cultivated the wheat and the multiple rotation crops with Tull-like mechanisms; worked at the gristmill and the distillery; managed the cattle and the sheep; gathered and applied the manure; and dug ditches and planted hedges to mark the estate’s boundaries. The carpenters among them coopered the barrels for the flour, helped build more housing for the burgeoning workforce, and joined with brickmakers to construct the elaborate barn, a project “of unprecedented scale and complexity,” Ragsdale notes.

At Mount Vernon, Washington likely brought to the management of the increasingly complicated New Husbandry the powerful shaping experience of his recent command of the Continental Army, an influence that Ragsdale neglects to consider. That job had included a broad range of interconnected responsibilities, including the acquisition of sufficient weapons, ammunition, and supplies; the training, feeding, discipline, and protection from disease of his ragtag troops; and the forging of them into a unified fighting force. At Mount Vernon, beginning in 1785, he reviewed weekly accounts that recorded the activities of his laborers, obtaining the data first himself and then from his overseers. A US senator later recalled that Washington’s overseers might “be styled generals,” adding:

The Friday of every week, is appointed for the overseers, or we will say brigadier generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or ewe drops her lamb but is registered…. Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army is preserved on his farm.

Washington was always concerned that Mount Vernon earn enough to cover the combined expenses of his self-styled gentleman’s life and farming operations. Ragsdale holds that the weekly reports reduced his enslaved laborers “to quantifiable units of production,” but he adds that Washington did not subject them to bookkeeping to determine profit and loss. Rather, the exercise aimed to assess the merits of managing the New Husbandry’s interwoven complexities with a reliance on enslaved labor.

Washington considered it a betrayal, perhaps something akin to desertion, when his enslaved workers ran away. He supported all efforts to recapture escapees from his own and others’ service. 

Like most slaveholders, he counted his enslaved laborers as strictly property suitable for sale or barter, or as currency for repayment of debts, valued according to their physical attributes, much as one might price a stallion or mare. On offering a consignment of salted fish and flour in Barbados, he declared that he would like payment “in Negroes”—two thirds young men and boys “not exceeding (at any rate) 20 yrs old,” the rest girls no older than sixteen, all “to be strait Limb’d, & in every respect strong & likely, with good Teeth & good Countenances—to be sufficiently provided with Cloaths.”

Before 1774 Washington had rarely acknowledged the cruel injustice of slavery and had taken its legitimacy for granted. But his attitudes began changing in response to the necessities of the Revolution and the forces it unleashed. To meet the need for able-bodied troops, several northern states allowed Blacks to join their militias. Washington resisted, but the initiative compelled him to participate in discussions of the “role of free Blacks and of slaves” in the war, Ragsdale writes. He reversed his stand, and ultimately some five thousand to eight thousand persons of African descent served in the Continental Army, making up as much as 3.5 percent of the total.

Amid spreading insistence that the principles of liberty applied to all human beings, Washington privately dismissed Quakers who encouraged enslaved people to seek their freedom, claiming that they “tampered” with men and women in bondage who were “happy & content to remain with their present masters.” 

However, he could not ignore Lafayette, a staunch enemy of slavery distressed by the idea that he might have enlisted his sword in defense of a country intent upon maintaining it. He urged Washington to endorse abolition and emancipate his slaves; several years later he tried unsuccessfully to enlist Washington’s support for an experiment in gradual emancipation. Washington assured his friend that he supported the scheme in principle, but he found reasons to stall.

Once back at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale says, Washington hoped to secure recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as an “enlightened and humane estate owner.” During the war he had ordered his manager to avoid the breakup of enslaved families and to refrain from selling any member without the enslaved person’s agreement. Now he told his overseers to continue providing his enslaved workers with adequate food and clothing, a draft of spirits during harvests, and medical care, emphasizing that they be treated “with humanity and tenderness when Sick.”

From the mid-1780s onward, troubled not least by the heated debates over slavery at the Constitutional Convention, Washington grew increasingly conflicted over his ownership of other human beings. Privately he confided that he considered it repugnant, in contradiction to the principles of the Revolution, and a form of property holding that undercut his enlightened identity. He found himself publicly attacked by antislavery advocates—for example, William Duane, an influential newspaper editor in Philadelphia, who lambasted “the great champion of American Freedom” for possessing “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.” In much of the Anglo-American world that Washington cared about, “enlightenment” and “enslavement” were simply not in rapport.

Moreover, Ragsdale emphasizes, Washington increasingly realized that the system of enslaved labor, with its inflexibility and coerciveness, was antithetical to the trust and collaboration necessary to realize the New Husbandry agriculture on which he believed the commercial future of the United States in part depended. Many of the tracts on slavery in his library reinforced his experience that enslaved labor was an obstacle to agricultural improvement, and his inquiries into farming elsewhere revealed that its strength in Pennsylvania greatly benefited from its free-labor character. He held that in return for the sustenance he provided, his enslaved laborers had a “duty” to work steadily and reliably. He judged them “capable of much labor” but lacking incentive to do it; he counted them “ignorant,” untrustworthy, inept, and “more & more insolent & difficult to govern.” In the Continental Army he had rallied his troops by successfully coupling inspiration to authority; as the manager of an enslaved labor force he had no call to higher purpose that might transform duty into effort.

During his presidency Washington began contemplating the emancipation of his enslaved laborers, but since he continued to hope that they could be made to serve his plans for agricultural improvement, he took no action. 

To the contrary, while living in Philadelphia during his presidency, he worried that the several enslaved workers attending him might be infected by the ideas of freedom loose in the city and by the prospect of emancipation entailed in a Pennsylvania law that enabled them to become indentured servants for a limited term after six months’ residence. To protect his property, Washington prevented them from exercising their legal right to eventual freedom by sending them temporarily out of the state before the six months ended. To protect his reputation as well as his authority over his enslaved servants, he insisted to his manager that the move be accomplished in utmost secrecy “under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.” At Mount Vernon he allowed his overseers to mete out corporal punishment, which he had intended to end. His averred resistance to selling slaves evaporated, likely for economic reasons; by his death in mid-December 1799 more than 70 percent of his married enslaved persons lived apart from their spouses.

In the late 1790s, Washington drew up a plan for reorganizing operations at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale finds, to relieve the estate of much of its reliance on enslaved laborers and make it more closely resemble those of his model improving landowners in Great Britain. However, in 1799, unable to devise a strategy for his New Husbandry without enslaved laborers, he abandoned completely the aim of freeing any of them during his lifetime. His essential preferences by then, however, were revealed in the new will that he composed in July, five months before he died. It formally freed all the 124 slaves he owned upon his death but deferred their actual manumission until Martha’s death. He also stipulated that his heirs provide support for the elderly, infirm, and children among them, and he required that the young be taught to read and write. Martha, uneasy about keeping Washington’s freed but still-enslaved men and women in bondage, liberated them on January 1, 1801. By March, most, evidently not as happy and content as Washington had liked to believe, had gone elsewhere.

The emancipation came too late for establishing the model for economic growth that Washington had wanted to achieve at Mount Vernon. He had been farsighted in trying to promote agricultural innovation, but he had been shortsighted in sidestepping Lafayette’s plea that he strike a blow for emancipation, and he had doomed his own efforts in the New Husbandry by shackling them—and keeping them shackled—to an enslaved labor force.

Daniel J. Kevles is a Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and a visiting scholar at NYU School of Law. His books include The Physicists, In the Name of Eugenics, The Baltimore Case, and, most recently, Heirloom Fruits of America: Selections from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. He is currently working on a history of innovation and intellectual property in living organisms. (February 2025)

Let;s write about literary refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe. A wonderful book review describes examples of courage

On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence.

Review of Marseille 1940: The Flight of Litrature* by Uwe Wittstock, published in the New York Review of Books by Maurice Samuels.  

After the fall of France in World War II, many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.

From left, Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry in Fry’s office, Marseille, 1941

It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time.

Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, the German army had broken through French defenses and was advancing at a pace that no one thought possible. Eight to ten million people fled in panic, jamming the roads. The situation was particularly dire for the German and Austrian refugees—many of them important writers and artists and many of them Jews—who had sought safety in France following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and found themselves once again at his mercy. The country they had escaped to suddenly became a country they needed to escape from. After the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern part of France, including Paris, as well as the Atlantic coast, while the south became a “free zone,” with its capital in the spa town of Vichy and a collaborationist government led by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. 

Many of the refugees converged on Marseille, France’s sole port not in Nazi hands, hoping to find a way out.

In Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, the German literary critic Uwe Wittstock traces the anguished itineraries of more than a dozen refugee writers and artists and the efforts by a group of courageous Americans—along with many anonymous but no less courageous French people—to rescue them. Told in a series of short, suspenseful vignettes, it is a sequel to his book February 1933: The Winter of Literature, which followed a group of German intellectuals in the days after Hitler came to power.

Some of those whose hasty escape from Germany Wittstock narrated in the first book reappear in the second in even more dire straits. February 1933 struck a chord by charting the shift from denial to panic when Germans suddenly found themselves living in a fascist country, and Marseille 1940 makes another timely intervention: as governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, it helps us understand the plight of those fleeing dangerous or difficult circumstances as well as our responsibility to help them.

Central to the story is Varian Fry, a temperamental American journalist who had witnessed Nazi cruelty toward Jews and other dissidents firsthand while reporting from Berlin in the 1930s and who realized early on the peril that the refugees faced in occupied France. Fry’s story is known to English-speaking readers—less so in Germany—thanks to several historical studies and to Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), which was adapted into the TV miniseries Transatlantic (2023). With the help of associates, including his wife, Eileen, Fry formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which raised funds to send him to Marseille with a list of two hundred prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals to track down and save. His efforts to obtain American visas for them received an unexpected boost from Eleanor Roosevelt, who remembered meeting Feuchtwanger on a book-signing tour in the 1930s and who was moved when his American publisher sent her a snapshot of the writer in tattered clothing staring out from behind the barbed-wire fence of Les Milles.

During an election year, FDR feared opposition to such efforts from isolationists as well as from those, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who claimed that the refugees would pose a threat to the United States. Applicants for entry were forced to prove that they had sufficient financial resources or a guarantor to support them so they would not become a public burden, to provide certification of their morality or good character (including an affirmation that they had never belonged to a Communist organization), and to submit a biographical sketch indicating the danger they faced at the hands of the Nazis. Despite enormous need, the State Department granted very few visas. However, the First Lady was able to apply pressure on her husband to speed the process for the famous names on the ERC’s list.

Even with American visas in hand, Fry had a difficult task. Locating the refugees on the list was the least of his problems: many sought him out after word spread of his presence in Marseille. 

But, getting them out of France was another matter. After the start of the war the only large transatlantic ocean liners departed from Lisbon, which meant that the refugees needed transit permits to cross Franco’s Spain and Portugal. Obtaining an exit visa from Vichy France was even more difficult, particularly for any refugee whose papers were not in order—as was the case for those who had refused to report to a French concentration camp or who had escaped from one. Fry eventually convinced an intrepid couple, the Hungarian-born Jewish antifascist resistance fighter Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, to smuggle frightened refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Drawing mainly on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wittstock follows a wide cast of characters as they struggle to obtain visas and seek passage out of Marseille. Some of the stories end happily. Hannah Arendt, who later drew on her refugee experience to write her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), managed to escape from the French concentration camp of Gurs with forged papers and miraculously reunite with her husband before eventually obtaining an exit visa from France with the help of Fry and American Jewish groups. The writer Anna Seghers (born Annette Reiling), who could not get a US entry visa because of her Communist affiliations, finally secured one to Mexico and found passage, thanks to Fry, on a cargo ship along with the Surrealist impresario André Breton and the young ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She channeled her experience into the novel Transit (1944).

Other refugees, such as Heinrich Mann, had a harder time. Once considered more successful than his brother and fellow novelist Thomas Mann, he began to lose his grip after fleeing Germany. Nervous and exhausted, he and his alcoholic wife made it to the US with the help of Fry, but he could not adjust to life outside Europe and never managed to regain his former stature. The philosopher Walter Benjamin did not make it out. In late September 1940, as his Spanish and Portuguese transit visas were about to expire and he was unable to obtain an exit visa from France, he presented himself at the doorstep of Fittko, an acquaintance from Paris, having heard that she was smuggling people across the Pyrenees. After being stopped by officials on the Spanish side of the border, Benjamin swallowed a lethal dose of morphine tablets rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. The next day the Spanish authorities, rattled by his death, let the rest of the party through.

Fry went to a great deal of trouble to help two antifascist Weimar politicians, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, both members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who had fled to France after opposing Hitler’s rise to power. Hilferding faced the added danger of being Jewish. They refused to be smuggled out of France with forged documents provided by Fry because they believed that such an escape was beneath their dignity as German politicians. Eventually the Vichy government granted them exit visas, and Fry helped arrange passage on one of the ships now traveling from Marseille to Martinique, but Breitscheid refused because the only available berth was in a dormitory below deck. It didn’t matter: in early 1941, shortly before the ship was to leave, they were both arrested by the Vichy police and handed to the Gestapo. Hilferding was tortured to death in custody, while Breitscheid perished at Buchenwald in 1944.

Although Wittstock makes readers feel the refugees’ overwhelming anxiety, he also relieves the tension with comedic moments. Feuchtwanger gets smuggled out of Saint Nicolas, another internment camp, by the American consul in Marseille, who gives him women’s clothes and tells him to pretend to be his mother-in-law when stopped by the French police. The novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, travel through France with twelve suitcases, some of them containing the original scores of Alma’s ex-husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, which they hope to sell once they reach America to finance their lives in exile. When the precious suitcases go missing in the chaos of the exodus, Alma convinces a besotted hotel keeper to track them down for her. The couple eventually make it over the Pyrenees in the same group as the Manns, their luggage in tow.

Many of the writers and artists who cross Wittstock’s pages are familiar figures, but this glimpse into their flights reveals them in a new light. Marseille 1940 reads like a nonfiction version of Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which follows a group of (non-Jewish French) characters as they flee Paris after the Nazi invasion.
Like Némirovsky, Wittstock explores how the extreme pressure of the historical moment functions as a kind of magnifying glass, revealing human characteristics that might never have emerged otherwise. Some of Wittstock’s subjects rise to the occasion. This is true particularly of the rescuers: Fry refused to buckle in the face of attempts by both Vichy officials and his colleagues back in New York to end his mission. The Fittkos risked their lives each time they ferried a group to safety. But it’s also true of many of the refugees, including Arendt and Seghers, who displayed a remarkable sangfroid and ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Some of them, however, descended into vindictiveness, pettiness, and worse. The catastrophe of France’s fall brought the deep-rooted rivalry between the Mann brothers to the surface and exacerbated tensions among the various Communist exiles. Mahler-Werfel, whose tortured romantic relationships with famous men—not just Mahler and Werfel but also the architect Walter Gropius—have earned her a dubious place in the pantheon of twentieth-century cultural icons, emerges in Wittstock’s account as a Hitler-loving harridan (bossy person) who regrets her marriage to the Jewish Werfel as soon as it puts her in danger. “Now I will have to wander to the ends of the earth with a people alien to me,” she confided to her journal, even as she and her husband engaged in an increasingly madcap folie à deux—lugging their twelve suitcases—through the south of France.

Historians may find fault with certain aspects of Marseille 1940. It lacks footnotes, making it impossible to tell which sources Wittstock used, and the bibliography is far from exhaustive. Some may bristle at the novelistic style. But Wittstock’s narrative method has advantages. By telling the stories of the refugees in the present tense, he forces us to see the world through their eyes. The book is filled with minute details that bring them to life—Feuchtwanger’s taxi to Les Milles, Mahler-Werfel’s suitcases—and allow us to experience the tragedy of France’s fall in a way that more conventional histories do not.

A more serious concern is the book’s focus on a relatively small number of renowned artists and writers. What about all the refugees who did not inspire the sympathy of the American First Lady and did not receive coveted American visas? Wittstock is not oblivious to this criticism. “Alongside every person mentioned in this book stood hundreds or thousands of others who had the same right to be memorialized,” he acknowledges in the epilogue. But the decision by the State Department to grant visas to only a select few is one of the great tragedies of the war, and Wittstock was not obliged to replicate it by keeping his focus so narrow. Aside from his descriptions of the throngs of people on the roads and the long lines at the American consulates, we get little sense of the plight of nonfamous refugees and no access to their inner lives.

Ultimately, though, I discerned a deeper purpose in his decision to focus on a narrow cast of celebrated characters. These are people we already know and care about. Some, like Arendt and Benjamin, are among the best-known intellectuals of our era. By depicting them as impoverished and desperate—denied, as Arendt put it, the “right to have rights”—Wittstock helps us conceive of a kind of suffering that all too often remains abstract when it affects unknown people in faraway lands.

Wittstock is preoccupied with the factors that enabled survival. To be sure, ingenuity and flexibility helped. Seghers turned to Mexico after the US closed its doors to her. Arendt saw an opening and slipped through when the time was right. They survived. Breitscheid and Hilferding refused to bend and did not. But as Wittstock makes clear, chance was a far more important factor. The decision to cross the Pyrenees at one place rather than another meant life or death. Whether refugees fleeing France happened to encounter a hostile border guard or one who was willing to let them through without the proper papers made all the difference: “In the end, whether one ends up with a supporter of Pétain or someone who sympathizes with the adversaries of the Nazis is a matter of luck.”

Even the luckiest refugees, however, would not have survived without a great deal of help from people who took enormous risks. By prolonging his stay in France to continue his work, Fry faced arrest and deportation, along with the dissolution of his marriage. The Fittkos faced certain death for their actions. The fact that Fry and his team—including two intrepid American women, the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who funded a large part of the operation, and Miriam Davenport, who administered it—were not heralded as heroes after the war is an injustice that has only recently begun to be rectified. Fry published his memoirs in 1945, but as Wittstock points out, “In the euphoria of victory, the American book market was not particularly interested in stories about past wartime suffering,” and many resented Fry’s allegations that the US State Department had made it difficult for Jewish refugees to enter America. He was not recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” until 1994.

And yet, though Fry’s contributions received belated recognition, the contributions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French people to saving refugees have received no recognition at all. Over and over Wittstock describes small acts of generosity and quiet heroism by ordinary people who had no idea of the renown of those they were aiding. Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler casts a dark shadow over France in this period, but as Lisa Fittko put it in her memoir:


None of us could have survived without the help of French people in every corner of the country—French men and women whose humanity gave them the courage to take in, to hide, and to feed these displaced strangers.

When Fittko came out of the hospital drained and depleted, a kind butcher gave her an extra ration of meat even though she lacked the proper coupon. When she and her husband were stopped on the street by a French gendarme assigned to arrest foreigners, their landlady vouched that they were her neighbors. “It is astonishing how greatly influenced the populace is by the model set by personages like the prefect or the city’s bishop,” Wittstock writes of the residents of the town of Montauban, who allowed Arendt to live quietly among them. “Their commitment to refugees focuses public attention on how they can be helped, not on how they can be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.”

Wittstock does not explicitly make the connection to the dire circumstances facing refugees in Europe and the United States today, but he doesn’t need to. The parallels are all too apparent. When Fry received notice of his imminent arrest from the Marseille chief of police, he protested that his detention would be a violation of human rights. The Vichy functionary scoffed, “I am aware that they still believe in the antiquated notion of human rights in the United States.” But soon, he predicted, America would jettison such outdated ideas: “We’ve realized that society is more important than the individual. You will also come to understand that.” Now that our leaders are proving that policeman right, the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940 are more essential than ever.

*June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.

It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.