7 rows · Oct 10, · The Art of the (American) Essay. HERE IS a history of America told in many voices. It's an Brand: Perfection Learning Corporation The Best American Essays of the Century. Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Atwan. Houghton Mifflin, - Literary Collections - pages. 1 Review. This singular collection is nothing less than a 4/5(1) 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 /5()
The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates
Among her major works are We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. close ; } } this. getElementById iframeId ; iframe. max contentDiv. scrollHeight, contentDiv. offsetHeight, contentDiv. document iframe. Enhance your purchase. 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.
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Offered by Amazon. Shop items. ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide. Foreword The Essay in the Twentieth Century When I was very best american essays of the century, 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 Emerson"s 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, best american essays of the century, 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.
He warned about the physical pain of forced smiles and acknowledged the advantages of being misunderstood, best american essays of the century. If the writings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides comprised a Guide for the Perplexed, Emerson"s essays provided a Guide for the Intimidated.
His independent, best american essays of the century, 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 inone could argue that the symbolic origins of the twentieth-century essay go back to the day in 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. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein, would permanently alter the course of the American essay by initiating two new modes of literary introspection: Du Bois"s "double-consciousness" grounded in racial identity and Stein"s experiments with "stream of consciousness.
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 best american essays of the century survived, even against the skepticism and irascibility of the Mark Twains, Randolph Bournes, and H. Menckens, who did their best to bury it. By the s, however, some writers were lamenting its demise, and in the most curious metaphors.
It lived on in college courses and gave the essay a bad name for decades. The goal of English teachers, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut recalls, was to get you "to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago. Our object was not to construct a Museum of the American Essay. Although some vestiges of "gentility" or essayistic "leisure" may have seeped in here and there, the ruling idea behind the volume was that the essays should speak to the present, not merely represent the past.
So you will find more "hard young sociologists" here than "cultivated" literati. After all, some of those young social scientists were Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurston, and a youthful Saul Bellow, who happened to be studying sociology and anthropology at Northwestern at precisely the same time the genteel essayists were lamenting their own demise. The sociologists, accompanied by such self-taught social critics as Edmund Wilson, Richard Wright, and James Agee, brought the essay out of the library and into the American factories, city streets, courthouses, and tenant farms.
For many of them, ardent pacifists and reformers, writing essays would amount to what James called "the moral equivalent of war. To be sure, the genteel essay was personal, but no matter how "familiar," it always politely stopped short of full disclosure. Here, too, William James made his presence felt.
The brilliant chapters "The Divided Self" and "The Sick Soul" in his monumental The Varieties of Religious Experience would become a valuable resource for essayists seeking ways to articulate despair, breakdowns, aberrant states of consciousness, psychic confusion, the ineffable in general.
Scott Fitzgerald"s famous observation in "The Crack-Up" - "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" - laid out a course for future essayists and expanded the possibilities of self-disclosure. As writers began amplifying the personal essay into what is now known singularly as "the memoir," the processes of confession would know no limits.
What best american essays of the century Will this new century reject our "best" essays as dramatically as the twentieth discarded those of James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes?
The s, best american essays of the century, too, saw astonishing changes in technology, rapid changes that frightened Henry Adams as he wondered what the "Law of Acceleration" would finally lead to. We have reached his speculative end point - visionary though he was, he never imagined a world transformed by electronics.
The Internet is already generating new sources of essays. Will it somehow channel the usual processes of prose into new literary forms the way some thought the typewriter had once done? Will young essayists discover audiences without having to sweat through the hundreds of rejection slips James Thurber received before he could break into print?
And will they do what few from any century have ever done: make a living writing essays? These remain to be seen, but what I think we can say for certain is that whatever new forms the essay takes, if they are wonderful, they will have the blessing of William James and his legitimate heirs. About This Collection This volume is not a "best of the best. Only seven of the essays in this volume come from the series.
We wish we could have included many more of the superb contemporary writers best american essays of the century have contributed to the yearly books, but it was of course not possible. Our consolation is that their work is still accessible to readers and that the annual books are for the most part available in libraries and bookstores.
It was important that we include writers from previous generations who may not be well known to today"s readers and who in our opinion still very much deserve an audience. I proceeded with this book in much the same way that I have with the annual volumes.
I screened a good number of essays - though far, far more than usual - and turned them over to Joyce Carol Oates for a final decision.
There were hundreds of essays to consider and so little space.
Top 11 Best American Writers
, time: 12:39The Best American Essays of the Century - Google Books
The Best American Essays of the Century. Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Atwan. Houghton Mifflin, - Literary Collections - pages. 1 Review. This singular collection is nothing less than a 4/5(1) This anthology is a well-. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan, the editors of "The Best American Essays of the Century," made many wonderful selections for this anthology. My personal favorites include Joan Didion's "The White Album," H.L. Mencken's "The Hills of Zion," and W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John."/5() 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 /5()
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