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The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series)
Studio : Houghton Mifflin
by Houghton Mifflin
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin
Released : 2001-10-10
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780618155873
UPC : 046442155878
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 13 reviews)
List Price : $19.95
Our Price : $9.95
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Product Description |
This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America"s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.
From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr."s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 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."
Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir,
T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard. |
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Americancivilwar.com Review |
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The title The Best American Essays of the Century seems transparent enough, but don't be deceived. What Joyce Carol Oates has assembled is not so much a diverse collection as a sonorous march through what keeps getting called the American century. Read this not as a collection to dip into but as a history--a history of race in America. Oates says it best herself in her introduction: "It can't be an accident that essays in this volume by men and women of ethnic minority backgrounds are outstanding; to paraphrase Melville, to write a 'mighty' work of prose you must have a 'mighty' theme." The mighty pens at work here belong to, among others, Zora Neale Hurston ("How It Feels to Be Colored Me"), Langston Hughes ("Bop"), and James Baldwin ("Notes of a Native Son"). Oates has opted not for the most unexpected but for the most important and stirring essays of our time. Other chords sound repeatedly as well: the problem of our relationship with nature (Annie Dillard, John Muir, and Gretel Ehrlich); the difficulty of identity in disrupted times (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, and Michael Herr). In her essay "The White Album," Didion famously declares: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The stories Oates has collected are not easy. Here is the hard-won truth, from writers unwilling to forgive even themselves. Even Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't let himself off the hook, as he writes in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me." --Claire Dederer |
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Uneven in Quality |
I was only able to obtain an abridged version of this collection on audiotape -- which did not include Baldwin's, Gould's, Hemingway's, Twain's, or Fitzgerald's essays. The particular collection I reviewed included three especially compelling essays: Dubois' essay comparing the return to a southern town of two Johns (one black, one white), which is a brilliant exploration of the Jim Crow system; Muir's essay about his near death experience with his dog Stickeen that is a wonderful treatment of man vs. nature; and Mansfield's recounting of the Battle of Okinawa, which is one of the best anti-war pieces I've ever read.
A number of the other pieces are fair to mediocre. I think what Oates ignores in her collection is the primacy of political writing in the latter half of the 20th century. Some of the finest writing today is not in the Muir tradition, but explores contemporary politics. Some of those political essays from the pages of the Atlantic or New Republic or New York Times or Washington Post should have been included. They are not mere current events writing, but are important historical documents and perhaps reflect where the best and the brightest essayists have put their talents over the last 50 years.
Still, the three essays named above make this collection worthwhile. |
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chocolate box of 20th-century thinking |
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This is a fantastic sampling of American memoir and reflections on race, gender, nature, literature, and other topics of broad interest. It features the century's greatest, starting with Twain, ending with Bellow. The volume is beautifully introduced by Atwan and Oates, both of whom help chip away at the manifold mystery of what makes a good essay. If memoir is of particular interest to you, you will appreciate the poetic sensibilities of the writers. The position essays are equally lucid. I will be teaching a course shortly on developing narrative style and feel fortunate to have stumbled upon this collection. For readers who are looking for varied and pleasant readings, the works in this book will provide that with a challenging edge. |
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An Essay for Every Taste |
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I loved this book because it illustrated to me how much our society has and hasn't changed over the years. The writing was exquisite which was a pleasant respite from today's 24/7 verbal and informational assaults which are produced so quickley and usually without much pondering or maturing of themes and ideas. I see the essay as a slowly dying art form and I am just an average American who loves to read and think and write, I'm definitely not an academic predicting the end of civilization because of the pace of life and thinking brought about by technology. |
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Very good indeed |
Joyce Carol Oates is not simply a prolific writer, she is also a tremendously 'prolific' reader. In this selection of the best American essays of the century, she and her co- editor series editor Robert Atwan choose many of the most important American essays of the century. If I just think of those I know beforehand there is William James famous ' The Moral Equivalent of War' which talks about the place of sport in American life. There is perhaps the most well- known literary essay of the century T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in which he argues that each new literary work of significance redefines the whole Tradition, makes us see it all in a new way. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald's tremendously moving personal essay on his own breakdown,'The Crack-up' in which he tells us ' in the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning. There is James Baldwin's searing essay, 'Notes of a Native Son' and Mark Twain telling us in 'Corn-pone' that where the person gets his core- pone is where his opinions is. It is a typical humorous and brilliant Twain attack on the common-sense conventional mind, and a call for the kind of independent thinking he in his work so exemplified.
There are a considerable number of essays on race, on the condition of the blacks in America. Richard Wright, Zola Hurston, Baldwin, Maya Angelou. There are outstanding essays on science by Lewis Thomas, Stephen J. Gould, Oliver Sachs. There are literary explorations and explorations of the American lanscape and mind.
Among the other writers included are Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Tom Wofe, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick ,William Manchester, John Updike, Saul Bellow, James Agee, John Jay Chapman, John Muir, Nabovkov, Edwin Hoagland, Willam Gass, Hemingway, Elizabeth Hardwick, S.J. Perelman, Gertrude Stein, Thurber, E.B. White , Oates herself and many others.
It may not contain all the best, and it may not all be good, but much of it is the best, and a good share very good indeed. |
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Not bad, but not the best of the century |
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Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had 100 years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up with. |
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