This volume 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 America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," 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."
This volume 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 America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," 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."
The Best American Essays of the Century
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Overview
This volume 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 America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," 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."
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780618043705 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
Publication date: | 09/22/2000 |
Series: | Best American Essays Series |
Pages: | 544 |
Product dimensions: | 6.46(w) x 9.33(h) x 1.86(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Princeton, New JerseyDate of Birth:
June 16, 1938Place of Birth:
Lockport, New YorkEducation:
B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961Read an Excerpt
The BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS of the Century
By Joyce Carol Oates Robert Atwan
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Copyright © 2000 Houghton Mifflin CompanyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0618155872
Introduction
The Art of the (American) EssayHERE IS a history of America told in many voices.
It's an elliptical tale, or a compendium of tales, of the American twentieth century by way of individual essays that, fitting together into a kind of mobile mosaic, suggest where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going. In his probing, provocative "The Creation Myth of Cooperstown," Stephen Jay Gould asks: "Why do we prefer creation myths to evolutionary stories?" The more we know of history, of both the natural and the civilized worlds, the more we understand that our tangled lives are ever evolving, and that our culture, far from being timeless, is a living expression of Time.
The essay, in its directness and intimacy, in its first-person authority, is the ideal literary form to convey such a vision. By tradition essays have been categorized as formal or informal; yet it can be argued that all essays are an expression of the human voice addressing an imagined audience, seeking to shift opinion, to influence judgment, to appeal to another in his or her common humanity. Even the most artfully composed essay suggests a naturalness of discourse. As our precursor Montaigne advised, "We must remove the mask."
The essays in thisvolume have all been written by writers who have published at least one collection of essays or nonfiction. Not only did this principle allow the editors a reasonable means of limiting selections, it is an acknowledgment that writing is a vocation, not merely an avocation. In a historical overview of a century virtually teeming with talent, I wanted to honor those writers who have made writing their life's work. I didn't see my role as one to reward the lucky amateur who writes a single good essay, then disappears forever. Better to search for little-known but excellent essays by, for instance, writers of historical significance like John Jay Chapman, Jane Addams, Edmund Wilson. Most of the essays are "informal"; but this isn't to suggest that they are innocent, unmediated utterances lacking the stratagems of art. Even Mark Twain's "Corn-pone Opinions," delivered in the author's characteristic forthright voice, is driven by a passionate intellectual conviction regarding the gullibility of mankind and the tragic consequences of this gullibility.
My general theme in the assemblage of this volume has been a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition (to paraphrase T. S. Eliot). My preference was always to essays that, springing from intense personal experience, are nonetheless significantly linked to larger issues, even if, as in the case of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, these issues are viewed playfully. The emotion I felt when beginning to read most of the essays gathered here was one of great excitement and anticipation; even, at times, a distinct visceral thrill. As an editor, I am primarily a reader. I could not countenance including essays out of duty's sake that, in fact, I found deadly dull. For the many essays considered for this volume, the majority of which ultimately had to be excluded, I was the ideal reader: I wanted to like what I read, and I was committed to reading the entire essay with sympathy. If you will substitute "literature" for "poetry" in this famous remark in a letter of Emily Dickinson's, you have my basic criterion for the work included in The Best American Essays of the Century: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
And what powerful openings in certain of these exemplary essays:
We are met to commemorate the anniversary of one of the most terrible crimes in history-not for the purpose of condemning it, but to repent of our share in it.
-John Jay Chapman, "Coatesville" (1912)
The knowledge of the existence of Devil Baby burst upon the residents of Hull House one day when three Italian women, with an excited rush through the door, demanded that he be shown to them.
-Jane Addams, "The Devil Baby at Hull-House" (1916)
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up" (1936)
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-Vladimir Nabokov, "Perfect Past" (1950)
On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century.
-James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955)
The decaying, downtown shopping section of Memphis-still another Main Street-lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King's funeral, under a siege.
-Elizabeth Hardwick, "The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King" (1968)
We were all strapped into the seats of the Chinook, fifty of us, and something, someone was hitting it from the outside with an enormous hammer. How do they do that? I thought, we're a thousand feet in the air!
-Michael Herr, "Illumination Rounds" (1977)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
-Joan Didion, "The White Album" (1978)
Of course there are crucial distinctions between the art of the essay and the art of prose fiction, yet to the reader the immediate experience in reading is an engagement with that mysterious presence we call voice. Reading, we "hear" another's speech replicated in our heads as if by magic. Where in life we sometimes (allegedly infrequently) fall in love at first sight, in reading we may fall in love with the special, singular qualities of another's voice; we may become mesmerized, haunted; we may be provoked, shocked, illuminated; we may be galvanized into action; we may be enraged, revulsed, and yet!-drawn irresistibly to experience this voice again, and again. It's a writer's unique employment of language to which we, as readers, are drawn, though we assume we admire the writer primarily for what he or she "has to say" For consider: how many intelligent, earnest, right-minded commentators published essays on such important subjects as racial conflict in twentieth-century America, social and personal disintegration in the thirties, morality, democracy, nostalgia-for-a-vanishing-America; class struggle, Civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, the mystical experience of nature, ethnic diversity, various American "myths"-and how few of these are worth rereading, let alone enshrining, in this new century. To be an editor in so massive an undertaking, committed to reading with sympathy countless essays of high worth and distinction published in the most prestigious journals of their era, beginning in about 1900 and sweeping through the decades, is to experience firsthand that quickening of dread, which Nabokov calls mere "common sense," in the realization of human mortality. So many meritorious voices, so much evidence of American good will and wisdom, and so many fallen by the wayside! There were times when I felt as if I were indeed standing at the edge of an abyss, entrusted with rescuing pages of impeccable prose being blown past me into oblivion, preserving what I could, surrendering all the rest. (Those excellent essayists of a bygone time John Muir, Randolph Bourne, and John Jay Chapman are preserved here; surrendered to the exigencies of space limitations are John Burroughs, George Santayana, Joseph Wood Krutch, Ellen Glasgow, and others listed in the Appendix.)
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish. Art should certainly aspire to beauty, but there are myriad sorts of beauty: the presentation of a subject in the most economical way, for instance; a precise choice of language, of detail. There is beauty in the calibrated ugliness of the opening of William Gass's meditation on suicide and art, "The Doomed in Their Sinking," because it is so finely calibrated; there is beauty in the eloquent, elegiac expression of hurt, rage, and despair in James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," because it is eloquent and elegiac, in the service of art. That staple of traditional essay collections, the unhurried musings of a disembodied (Caucasian, male, privileged) consciousness, is missing here, except for its highest, most lyric expression in E. B. White's classic "Once More to the Lake" and its total transmogrification in Edward Hoagland's powerful "Heaven and Nature"-which is about neither heaven nor nature. (Hoagland, one of the few American writers who has forged a brilliant career out of essays, is our Chopin of the genre. Though best known for such nature essays as "The Courage of Turtles," "Red Wolves and Black Bears" and "Earth's Eye," in the tradition of Thoreau, Hoagland is equally memorable as a recorder of startling, confessional utterances of a kind the very private Thoreau would not have dared.) Though there are deeply moving essays in the nostalgic/ musing mode by such fine writers as White, James Agee, Eudora Welty, and John Updike, I have given more space to what might be called a radical expansion of this familiar genre, essays that have the power of personal nostalgia yet are not sentimental, and in which private contemplation touches on crucial public issues, as Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," Loren Eiseley's "The Brown Wasps," N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain," Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Richard Rodriguez's "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood," and others. If you begin Edmund Wilson's "The Old Stone House" presuming it to be another nostalgic lament for a vanishing America, you will be shocked by the author's conclusion:
And what about me? As I come back in the train, I find that-other causes contributing-my depression of Talcottville deepens. I did not find the river and the forest of my dream-I did not find the magic of the past ... I would not go back to that old life if I could: the civilization of northern New York- why should I idealize it?-was too lonely, too poor, too provincial.
Similarly, Donald Hall's "A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails" is both a sympathetic portrait of an older relative of the writer's and a devastating critique of the romance of American rural eccentricity, the stock material of how many homespun reminiscences in the Norman Rockwell mode:
[Washington Woodward] worked hard all his life at being himself, but there were no principles to examine when his life was over... The life that he could recall totally was not worth recalling; it was a box of string too short to be saved.
Apart from being first-rate reportage, Joan Didion's "The White Album" can be seen as a radical variant of the genre of nostalgia as well, in which the essayist positions her intimate, interior life ("an attack of vertigo and nausea does not seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968") within the larger, wayward, and "poorly comprehended" life of our culture circa 1966-1978, with the defiant conclusion "writing [this] has not yet helped me to see what it means": the antithesis of the traditional essay, which was organized around a principle, or epiphany, toward which it confidently moved. So too Michael Herr's "Illumination Rounds," from Dispatches, is appropriately ironically titled, for little is finally illuminated in this account of a young American journalist's visit to Vietnam in the mid-seventies, at the height of that protracted and tragic war; the techniques of vividly cinematic fiction writing are here employed in the service of the author's vision, but there is, conspicuously, no "moral"-no "moralizing." This is the art of the contemporary essay, or memoir: a heightened, trompe l'oeil attention to detail that allows the reader to see, hear, witness, as if at first hand, what the essayist has witnessed. Though this is "informal" writing, there is no lack of form. Postmodernist strategies of fragmentation and collage have replaced that of exposition, summary, and argument.
For all their diversity, essays tend to fall into three general types: those that present opinions primarily, and have been written to "instruct"; those that impart information and knowledge; and those that record personal impressionistic experiences, especially memories. These categories often overlap, of course, as in the outstanding essays named above, and in recent years, judging from the annual series The Best American Essays, from which essays in this volume published since 1985 have been taken, the genre has evolved into a form closely akin to prose fiction and prose poetry, employing dialogue, dramatic scenes, withheld information, suspense.
The essay of opinion, of which Montaigne (1533-1592) was an early, highly influential master, was for centuries the quintessential essay. Here, you find no dialogue or dramatic scenes, only a rational, reasoning voice. Such an essay is an argument, often couched in conversational terms; its intention is to instruct, to illuminate, to influence. Except for editorial and op-ed pages of newspapers, in which they appear in miniature form, and in a very few general-interest magazines like Harper's and the Atlantic, such essays are not much favored today.
Continue...
Excerpted from The BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates Robert Atwan Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword | x | |
Introduction | xvii | |
1901: Corn-pone Opinions | 1 | |
1903: Of the Coming of John | 6 | |
1906: A Law of Acceleration | 20 | |
1909: Stickeen | 28 | |
1910: The Moral Equivalent of War | 45 | |
1911: The Handicapped | 57 | |
1912: Coatesville | 71 | |
1916: The Devil Baby at Hull-House | 75 | |
1919: Tradition and the Individual Talent | 90 | |
1923: Pamplona in July | 98 | |
1925: The Hills of Zion | 107 | |
1928: How It Feels to Be Colored Me | 114 | |
1933: The Old Stone House | 118 | |
1935: What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them | 131 | |
1936: The Crack-Up | 139 | |
1937: Sex Ex Machina | 153 | |
1937: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch | 159 | |
1938: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 | 171 | |
1939: The Figure a Poem Makes | 176 | |
1941: Once More to the Lake | 179 | |
1944: Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away | 186 | |
1949: Bop | 190 | |
1950: The Future Is Now | 193 | |
1953: Artists in Uniform | 199 | |
1955: The Marginal World | 214 | |
1955: Notes of a Native Son | 220 | |
1956: The Brown Wasps | 239 | |
1957: A Sweet Devouring | 246 | |
1961: A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails | 252 | |
1963: Letter from Birmingham Jail | 263 | |
1964: Putting Daddy On | 280 | |
1964: Notes on "Camp" | 288 | |
1966: Perfect Past | 303 | |
1967: The Way to Rainy Mountain | 313 | |
1968: The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King | 319 | |
1969: Illumination Rounds | 327 | |
1970: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | 342 | |
1971: The Lives of a Cell | 358 | |
1972: The Search for Marvin Gardens | 361 | |
1972: The Doomed in Their Sinking | 373 | |
1975: No Name Woman | 383 | |
1975: Looking for Zora | 395 | |
1977: Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying | 412 | |
1979: The White Album | 421 | |
1980: Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood | 447 | |
1981: The Solace of Open Spaces | 467 | |
1982: Total Eclipse | 477 | |
1982: A Drugstore in Winter | 490 | |
1987: Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All | 497 | |
1988: Heaven and Nature | 507 | |
1989: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown | 520 | |
1990: Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant | 532 | |
1993: The Disposable Rocket | 549 | |
1995: They All Just Went Away | 553 | |
1997: Graven Images | 564 | |
Biographical Notes | 569 | |
Appendix | Notable Twentieth-Century American Literary Nonfiction | 591 |