Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America

Acclaimed New Yorker contributor Lauren Michele Jackson delivers a thought-provoking essay collection exploring the back—and the powerful, often conflicting meanings we attach to it.

Moving effortlessly across literature, film, sports, visual art, and American history, Jackson examines how the back has become a symbol of beauty, gender, labor, race, vulnerability, and political solidarity. At once deeply personal and richly analytical, she reveals the back as both a physical reality and a powerful cultural metaphor.

With prose that is as accessible as it is intellectually engaging, Jackson explores a wide range of subjects, including bodybuilding, ballet, portrait photography, Gone With the Wind, horse racing, copyright law, and the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each essay uncovers unexpected connections that illuminate how bodies—and the stories we tell about them—shape our understanding of the world.

Back is an original and insightful meditation on the body as both structure and symbol, revealing how artistic expression, cultural history, and political life are united by questions of who bears weight, who is seen, and who is remembered.