Ellen Wayland-Smith

Ellen Wayland-Smith is the author of two books of American cultural history, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador, 2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Her essay collection, The Science of Last Things, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press in 2024. She is a professor (teaching) in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

Sleepwalking to Madness in Mid-Century America: On Audrey Clare Farley’s “Girls and Their Monsters”

Ellen Wayland-Smith is haunted by Audrey Clare Farley’s exposé, in “Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America,” of white American mid-century pathologies....

ELLEN WAYLAND-SMITH

NONFICTION

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

HISTORY

The Missing: On Sasha LaPointe’s “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk”

Ellen Wayland-Smith explores the meanings of exile and impermanence “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk” by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe....

ELLEN WAYLAND-SMITH

MEMOIR & ESSAY

Of Grace and Pain: On Ashley C. Ford’s “Somebody’s Daughter”

Ellen Wayland-Smith explores Ashley C. Ford’s “Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir.”...

ELLEN WAYLAND-SMITH

MEMOIR & ESSAY