AJLangguth.com

Selected Works

History
James Madison leads an unprepared nation into a struggle that will establish the United States as a major world power and stake its claim to the entire continent.
"A breathtaking portrait of boldness, courage...and sheer youthful vitality."--Newsweek
"A powerful indictment of what the United States helped to bring about in this hemisphere."--The New York Times.
A nonfiction examination of the fall of the Roman Republic--political and military history from 81 B.C. to 30 B.C. (Simon&Schuster, 1994)
Fiction
"A novel of the death of God, with many resurrections and many Christs." Harper& Row, 1968.
"Wedlock is very good, full of sharp insight and throwaway wit...Langguth writes a sternly brilliant prose, and his characters live."--Elizabeth Janeway, 1972
"This quick-running, exciting novel poses a number of disturbing questions in a spare prose that gives the book great bite." Harper&Row, 1974
Occult
"Despite his total immersion in the rituals, Langguth asked the skeptical questions that allowed him to produce here the first objective book on Brazil's Macumba in English."
Literary Biography
"A Saki biography at last, and surely a definitive one...An achievement.--Emlyn Williams.
Letters
More than six decades of letters from the author of "On a Note of Triumph," often called the poet of the Golden Age of Radio.

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Macumba: White and Black Magic in Brazil

Chapter One begins:
"The first time I saw a spirit descend to earth and take control of a human body, I thought I was watching an epileptic seizure and turned my head away. It was a significant moment in my life, and I took it for a minor social embarrassment.
"The victim, a girl, had been dancing for two hours when with no warning she staggered as though she had been felled by a hammer. She recovered balance but stumbled over the floor with her eyes rolling up somewhere under her brows, and behind their long fluttering lashes, the whites of those eyes looked like semaphores of pain."