The Best American Essays of the Century

by Oates, Joyce Carol; Atwan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780618043705
• ISBN10: 0618043705
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction to this volume, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition." Along with Robert Atwan, who has overseen the acclaimed BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS series since its inception in 1986, Oates has chosen a list of works that are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address. This collection honors some of the twentieth century's best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is Americas enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wrights "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwins "Notes of a Native Son," Zora Neale Hurstons "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and others. The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about "The Lives of a Cell," Rachel Carson mulls "The Marginal World," and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown." Taken together, these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going."Mark Twain - W.E.B. Du Bois - Henry Adams - John Muir - William James - Randolph Bourne - John Jay Chapman - Jane Addams - T. S. Eliot - Ernest Hemingway - H. L. Mencken - Zora Neale Hurston - Edmund Wilson - Gertrude Stein - F. Scott Fitzgerald - James Thurber - Richard Wright - James Agee - Robert Frost - E. B. White - S. J. Perelman - Langston Hughes - Katherine Anne Porter - Mary McCarthy - Rachel Carson - James Baldwin - Loren Eiseley - Eudora Welty - Donald Hall - Martin Luther King, Jr. - Tom Wolfe - Susan Sontag - Vladimir Nabokov - N. Scott Momaday - Elizabeth Hardwick - Michael Herr - Maya Angelou - Lewis Thomas - John McPhee - William H. Gass - Maxine Hong Kingston - Alice Walker - Adrienne Rich - Joan Didion - Richard Rodriguez - Gretel Ehrlich - Annie Dillard - Cynthia Ozick - William Manchester - Edward Hoagland - Stephen Jay Gould - Gerald Early - John Updike - Joyce Carol Oates - Saul Bellow

Author Biography

Joyce Carol Oates -- novelist, essayist, critic, poet, playwright, and teacher -- is one of our preeminent literary figures and social critics. She has written more than forty novels and novellas, among them the 1970 National Book Award winner Them, as well as several volumes of poetry, many plays, and five books of literary criticism. She has been a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters since 1978 Robery Atwan has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide. He has recently edited Chapters into Verse, a collection of poetry inspired by the Bible, and Divine Inspiration, a volume of world poetry on the Gospels

Table of Contents

Foreword	x
Robert Atwan
Introduction	xvii
Joyce Carol Oates
Corn-pone Opinions	1	(5)
Mark Twain
Of the Coming of John	6	(14)
W.E.B. Du Bois
A Law of Acceleration	20	(8)
Henry Adams
Stickeen	28	(17)
John Muir
The Moral Equivalent of War	45	(12)
William James
The Handicapped	57	(14)
Randolph Bourne
Coatesville	71	(4)
John Jay Chapman
The Devil Baby at Hull-House	75	(15)
Jane Addams
Tradition and the Individual Talent	90	(8)
T. S. Eliot
Pamplona in July	98	(9)
Ernest Hemingway
The Hills of Zion	107	(7)
H. L. Mencken
How It Feels to Be Colored Me	114	(4)
Zora Neale Hurston
The Old Stone House	118	(13)
Edmund Wilson
What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them	131	(8)
Gertrude Stein
The Crack-Up	139	(14)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sex Ex Machina	153	(6)
James Thurber
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch	159	(12)
Richard Wright
Knoxville: Summer of 1915	171	(5)
James Agee
The Figure a Poem Makes	176	(3)
Robert Frost
Once More to the Lake	179	(7)
E. B. White
Insert Flap ``A'' and Throw Away	186	(4)
S. J. Perelman
Bop	190	(3)
Langston Hughes
The Future Is Now	193	(6)
Katherine Anne Porter
Artists in Uniform	199	(15)
Mary Mccarthy
The Marginal World	214	(6)
Rachel Carson
Notes of a Native Son	220	(19)
James Baldwin
The Brown Wasps	239	(7)
Loren Eiseley
A Sweet Devouring	246	(6)
Eudora Welty
A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails	252	(11)
Donald Hall
Letter from Birmingham Jail	263	(17)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Putting Daddy On	280	(8)
Tom Wolfe
Notes on ``Camp''	288	(15)
Susan Sontag
Perfect Past	303	(10)
Vladimir Nabokov
The Way to Rainy Mountain	313	(6)
N. Scott Momaday
The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King	319	(8)
Elizabeth Hardwick
Illumination Rounds	327	(15)
Michael Herr
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	342	(16)
Maya Angelou
The Lives of a Cell	358	(3)
Lewis Thomas
The Search for Marvin Gardens	361	(12)
John Mcphee
The Doomed in Their Sinking	373	(10)
William H. Gass
No Name Woman	383	(12)
Maxine Hong Kingston
Looking for Zora	395	(17)
Alice Walker
Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying	412	(9)
Adrienne Rich
The White Album	421	(26)
Joan Didion
Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood	447	(20)
Richard Rodriguez
The Solace of Open Spaces	467	(10)
Gretel Ehrlich
Total Eclipse	477	(13)
Annie Dillard
A Drugstore in Winter	490	(7)
Cynthia Ozick
Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All	497	(10)
William Manchester
Heaven and Nature	507	(13)
Edward Hoagland
The Creation Myths of Cooperstown	520	(12)
Stephen Jay Gould
Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant	532	(17)
Gerald Early
The Disposable Rocket	549	(4)
John Updike
They All Just Went Away	553	(11)
Joyce Carol Oates
Graven Images	564	(5)
Saul Bellow
Biographical Notes	569	(22)
Appendix: Notable Twentieth-Century American Literary Nonfiction	591

Excerpts

Foreword The Essay in the Twentieth Century When I was very young, my father purchased a small, uniform set of cheap literary classics. Why, I never knew. He was not a reader. Perhaps he had been duped by a door-to-door salesman. Perhaps he had aspirations for his children. The books crowded the only bookshelf in a cramped two-family house hedged in by humming factories on a narrow street that dead-ended into the mysterious and spectacular sumac- lined banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. As a result of his once-in-a-lifetime purchase I grew up with the privilege of knowing that Emerson was not merely the name of a television set. I found Emersons message bracing and liberating. I can see it now as self-help elevated to the highest literary standard, but reading "Self-Reliance" as an adolescent I simply took heart from his exhortations to resist conformity, trust in oneself, and not feel pressured by conventions, parties, and authority: "I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions," he said. "If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument," he said. "Insist on yourself; never imitate," he said. He warned about the physical pain of forced smiles and acknowledged the advantages of being misunderstood. If the writings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides comprised a Guide for the Perplexed, Emersons essays provided a Guide for the Intimidated. His independent, freethinking, inquisitive mind shaped American thought and writing, and his spiritual heirs invented the twentieth-century essay. Although Emerson may be said to hover over the volume, his presence can be detected more directly in one of his most prominent descendants, William James. Although this selection of great American essays begins in 1901, one could argue that the symbolic origins of the twentieth-century essay go back to the day in 1842 when Emerson was invited by the James family to visit their New York apartment and "bless" young William in his cradle. As a teacher, lecturer, physician, scientist, and one of the founders of modern psychology, William James would exert a powerful influence over the new century. Two of his students, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein, would permanently alter the course of the American essay by initiating two new modes of literary introspection: Du Boiss "double-consciousness" grounded in racial identity and Steins experiments with "stream of consciousness." Both originated in the critical first decade of the century, and their literary legacies can be felt throughout this collection. The twentieth-century essay also emerged from a resistance to the "familiar" or "polite" essay that had been a literary staple of the preceding era. Proper, congenial, Anglophilic, the genteel essay survived, even against the skepticism and irascibility of the Mark Twains, Randolph Bournes, and H. L. Menckens, who did their best to bury it. By the 1930s, howeve

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