The Best American Essays of the Century

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 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, 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, Emerson's essays provided a Guide for the \ Intimidated. His independent, freethinking, inquisitive mind shaped \ American thought and writing, and his spiritual heirsinvented 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 Bois's "double-consciousness" \ grounded in racial identity and Stein's 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, however, some writers were lamenting its \ demise, and in the most curious metaphors. "The familiar essay, that \ lavender-scented little old lady of literature, has passed away," one \ wrote, regretting that magazines now filled their pages with "crisp \ articles, blatant exposés, or statistic-laden surveys," and \ concluding that one day "her pale ghost will not appear at all, and \ the hard young sociologists can have her pages all to themselves." \ But the "pale ghost" did not vanish all at once. 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."\ This collection features none of those "lavender-scented" \ essays, not even for historical reasons. 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."\ Unlike their predecessors, twentieth-century essayists were \ eager to confront inner as well as outer strife. 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 (1902) would become a valuable resource for essayists \ seeking ways to articulate despair, breakdowns, aberrant states of \ consciousness, psychic confusion, the ineffable in general. F. 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 next? Will this new century reject our "best" essays as \ dramatically as the twentieth discarded those of James Russell Lowell \ and Oliver Wendell Holmes? The 1890s, 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." I founded The Best American \ Essays series in 1986, and therefore Joyce Carol Oates and I had only \ a small slice of the century to provide us with essays that had \ already achieved an annual "best" status. 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 who 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. But we winnowed and winnowed and arrived at these \ fifty-five. We tried to include the best of as many different kinds \ of essay as possible - personal, critical, philosophical, humorous, \ pastoral, autobiographical, scientific, documentary, political. \ Obviously we had to pull back in many cases. A comparable volume \ could be assembled to showcase each one of these categories. I also \ exercised one final choice: I insisted that Oates's essay from The \ Best American Essays 1996, "They All Just Went Away," be included.\ "Essays end up in books," Susan Sontag writes, "but they \ start their lives in magazines." That fact may not interest many \ readers, but it played a large role in the research for this book, \ since between an essay's debut in a periodical and its inclusion in a \ collection, a good deal of revision often occurs. Vladimir Nabokov's \ memoir of his father, for example, went through three very distinct \ publishing stages. It began life as "The Perfect Past" in The New \ Yorker in 1950, but Nabokov, dissatisfied with some of the editing, \ returned to his original typescript when he included (and expanded) \ it as the opening chapter of his 1951 autobiography, Conclusive \ Evidence. When he revised that book as Speak, Memory: An \ Autobiography Revisited in 1966, he expanded the essay yet again. Of \ the three published versions, we chose - as we did with many of the \ selections - to reprint the final version, as it would reflect and \ respect the author's final decisions. But in some instances \ (consistency "is the hobgoblin of little minds," Emerson said), we \ selected the first or a different published version.\ Some essays start out looking like essays only to reemerge in \ unexpected contexts. James Agee's lovely childhood \ reminiscence, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," started out in Partisan \ Review in 1938 but was given a new twist when an editor cleverly \ borrowed and italicized it in 1957 to serve as the introduction to \ Agee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. Other \ essays in this book were also put to service by their authors to \ introduce works of fiction: Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living \ Jim Crow" became the preface to his collection of stories Uncle Tom's \ Children, and N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain" now \ serves as the prologue to his popular novel of the same title.\ I discovered that there is rarely only one version of an \ essay. Susan Sontag's useful observation sometimes gets reversed: an \ essay starts out in book form and ends up in a magazine. Several \ essays in this volume were skillfully carved out of books and re-\ created either by their authors or a magazine's editors as \ independent essays. Usually, what's required is the removal of the \ interstitial glue that connects a book's separate chapters. For \ example, the opening sections of Maya Angelou's 1970 memoir, I Know \ Why the Caged Bird Sings, were transformed into a memorable childhood \ reminiscence of the same title in Harper's Magazine.\ Because essays may go through so many publishing variations, \ settling on a precise date for each selection was no easy matter. I \ proceeded largely case by case. Nabokov's 1966 essay on his father \ was so transformed from its 1950 origins that it seemed only \ reasonable to use the later date. So, too, I decided to use the final \ publication date for John Muir's Alaskan adventures with his \ unforgettable companion Stickeen; it was that version, and not the \ earlier and now forgotten essay, that became his most popular work. \ But occasionally I thought it would be misleading to use the final \ date of publication. Langston Hughes's "Bop," for example, clearly \ comes out of the forties; though it was revised considerably for \ subsequent book publication, to place it in a later decade would \ distort its contemporary flavor. An essay like Mark Twain's "Corn-\ pone Opinions," never published in the author's lifetime, is listed \ by date of composition.\ For the reader's convenience, I have attached brief notes to \ each essay outlining its publishing history and supplying relevant \ contextual information. I have placed an asterisk before the source \ used for this collection. I have also translated foreign words and \ phrases within brackets when it seemed necessary. Additional \ information is contained in the Biographical Notes in the back of the \ book, where I included pertinent information on the writer's career, \ relevant details to establish a context for the selected essay, and \ titles of books and collections (with the emphasis on nonfiction) \ that will direct interested readers to more books by that writer.\ Writers and magazine editors interested in submitting \ published essays for the annual volumes should send complimentary \ issues, subscriptions, or appropriate material to Robert Atwan, \ Series Editor, The Best American Essays, Box 220, Readville, \ Massachusetts 02137-9998. Criteria and guidelines can be found in the \ annual book.\ Acknowledgments\ As I researched books and periodicals for this unprecedented volume, \ I often felt like Henry Adams, poised at the crossroads of two time \ periods: the rapidly accelerating age of cyberspace that instantly \ furnishes vast amounts of information and the old-fashioned era of \ dim library stacks and dusty, out-of-print books. The experience was \ both high-tech and low-tech. If it was satisfying to sit at my desk \ and click a few keys for immediate access to material that only a few \ years ago would have required frequent library visits, it was even \ more satisfying to hold in my hand hardcover first editions of books \ like Martin Luther King's Why We Can't Wait or H. L. Mencken's \ Prejudices. Even obtaining these books involved travel in both \ worlds: through the Internet I could enter my local library's \ regional network, discover books it didn't own, and conveniently \ order them online. A day or two later - and sometimes within hours - \ I would be experiencing the tactile and intellectual pleasures of \ handling some of the treasured pieces of our literary heritage. For \ their invaluable assistance, then, I want to thank especially the \ staff of the Milton Public Library as well as all the other \ institutions connected with the Old Colony Library Network in \ Massachusetts.\ What I was unable to find, my researcher could. Much of the \ knottier research - establishing the original source or date of an \ essay, or tracking down an elusive periodical - was performed by \ Donna Ashley, who relied on the superb resources of the libraries at \ the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Boston \ College, and the Boston Public Library. Nearly all of the source \ notes attached to each essay derive from her dogged research; without \ her assistance this project might have taken another year to \ complete. I want to thank, too, Arthur Johnson for his generous help \ in providing permissions data for all of the essays. I borrowed a \ good deal of biographical information about the essayists from some \ of my previous anthologies and would like to thank a few coeditors \ for their contributions: Martha Banta, Bruce Forer, Justin Kaplan, \ Donald McQuade, David Minter, Jon Roberts, Robert Stepto, and William \ Vesterman. I'm enormously grateful to Charles H. Christensen for his \ advice and encouragement over the years. The Houghton Mifflin staff \ has been helpful and supportive as always, and I'd like to thank \ Janet Silver, Sean Lawler, Larry Cooper, Bridget Marmion, Dean \ Johnson, and Bruce Cantley for all their efforts. My wife, Hélène \ Atwan, kindly read over portions of the manuscript and offered many \ valuable suggestions for which I am very grateful. Finally, it was a \ great pleasure to work once again with Joyce Carol Oates. Her broad \ knowledge of American writing and her literary judgment transformed \ what seemed like a paralyzing critical task - reducing several \ hundred great essays to a mere fifty-five - into a spirited, \ illuminating assessment of the modern American essayist's struggle to \ encompass the creative energies and social emergencies of a century \ that had no shortage of either.\ Robert Atwan \ \ Introduction\ The Art of the (American) Essay\ Here 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 this volume 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 first-hand 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. In our egalitarian culture we tend \ to feel, rightly or wrongly, that an essayist's opinion is only as \ good as his or her expertise, and in such uncharted areas as ethics, \ morals, and general wisdom, whose opinion should be taken more \ seriously than anyone else's? In the past, however, the gentlemanly \ art of opinion-offering was commonplace; Ralph Waldo Emerson is the \ North American master of this form. With the publication of "Nature" \ in 1836, Emerson's prestige and influence through the whole of the \ nineteenth century was incalculable. Here was a brilliant aphoristic-\ philosophical mind expressed in an elegantly idiosyncratic language. \ Henry David Thoreau, Emerson's younger contemporary, combines strong \ opinions with a wealth of observed information and firsthand \ experience in a crystalline, poetic prose, and for this reason seems \ to us more modern, and far more accessible, than Emerson. There is a \ rich subcategory of American essays, the confrontation of nature by a \ refined, fastidiously observing consciousness, that has descended to \ us from Thoreau; I would have dearly liked to include more \ practitioners of this sort but had room for only John Muir, Rachel \ Carson, Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Gretel Ehrlich. (But all \ these essays are gems.) In general, our patience tends to wear thin \ when we're confronted with sermonizing in its many forms; I most \ often encountered such essays among those published in the first four \ or five decades of the century, when magazines seemed to have \ unlimited space for rambling, genial prose by men with nothing \ especially urgent on their minds apart from platitudes of nature and \ morality. Who were the readers of these essays, I wondered. The more \ elusive the subject, the more verbose the style, as in two \ fascinating masterpieces of ellipsis, indirection, and irresolution \ by Henry James at his most baroque, "Is There a Life after Death?" \ (1910) and "Within the Rim" (1915). ("Is There a Life after Death?" \ was initially included in this volume, and then reluctantly excluded; \ then included again, and finally excluded. A longtime admirer of \ Henry James, I wanted badly for him to be represented, but the essay \ is, one might say, "Jamesian," and long, and could hardly be \ justified as among the best of the century. And "Within the Rim," on \ the apparent theme of war, is even more abstruse.)\ Yet for all their unfashionableness, the opinion essays \ included here are, I think, excellent, and will repay the sort of \ close, sympathetic reading required for prose that isn't immediately \ gripping and specific. Henry Adams's "A Law of Acceleration," from \ the classic The Education of Henry Adams, is a bravura work of \ astonishing intellectual abstraction; written nearly one hundred \ years ago, it strikes a disturbingly contemporary note in its somber \ contemplation of a mechanistic universe reduced to a series \ of "relations" and mankind itself reduced to "Motion in a universe of \ Motions, with an acceleration . . . of vertiginous violence." With \ the authority of science, Adams says, history has no right to meddle, \ since science "now lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred \ minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes." \ Fittingly, William James's famous "The Moral Equivalent of War" was \ written in the same year, 1910, as Henry James's "Is There a Life \ after Death?" Though William James is a far more lucid prose stylist \ than his younger brother, both brothers are concerned with profound \ questions of life and death; William James broods upon the future of \ civilization itself in a prophetic work that looks ahead to Freud's \ late, melancholic Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). What is \ history but a bloodbath? "The horrors make the fascination. War is \ the strong life; it is life in extremis; war-taxes are the only ones \ men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us." \ John Jay Chapman, once considered an essayist of nearly Emerson's \ stature, is not much read today, yet his passionate meditation upon a \ notorious lynching that took place in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in \ 1911 transcends its time and tragic circumstances.\ The two most influential literary essays of the twentieth \ century are perhaps T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual \ Talent" ("The emotion of art is impersonal") and Robert Frost's "The \ Figure a Poem Makes" ("No tears in the writer, no tears in the \ reader"); each gains from being read in conjunction with the other. \ Sui generis is Gertrude Stein's "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are \ There So Few of Them," itself a masterpiece of polemics, an argument \ that convinces by sheer repetition:\ . . . One has not identity [when] one is in the act of doing \ anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you \ and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are \ not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog \ knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are \ you and your recognizing that he knows, is what destroys creation.\ H. L. Mencken's "The Hills of Zion" is, like many of \ Mencken's essays and columns, a passionate repudiation of evangelical \ Christianity and anti-intellectualism. This is sermonizing disguised \ as social satire, zestful in its accumulation of damning details; one \ can see why the young Negro Richard Wright was so impressed by \ Mencken's example, seeing the older white man as "fighting, fighting \ with words . . . using words as a weapon . . . as one would use a \ club." Katherine Anne Porter's "The Future Is Now" is an almost \ purely cerebral opinion piece, less compelling perhaps than Porter's \ elegantly composed short stories, but gracefully argued nonetheless, \ while "Artists in Uniform," one of Mary McCarthy's most anthologized \ essays, smoothly combines her satirical gifts with her passion for \ intellectual discourse. Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is both \ opinion essay and cultural criticism of a high order; Adrienne Rich's \ dramatically fragmented "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" might \ be defined as an essay of opinion in a unique, poetic form. Essays by \ Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, N. Scott Momaday, and Cynthia Ozick \ advance arguments by means of an accumulation of memoirist detail, \ and each presents us with the wonder of how, in Ozick's words, "a \ writer is dreamed and transfigured into being." And essays that seem \ to be primarily concerned with the imparting of information and \ description, like Loren Eiseley's "The Brown Wasps," Tom \ Wolfe's "Putting Daddy On," Elizabeth Hardwick's "The Apotheosis of \ Martin Luther King," Lewis Thomas's "The Lives of a Cell," Annie \ Dillard's "Total Eclipse," among others, contain arguments of \ subtlety and insight. Saul Bellow's "Graven Images" is a meditation \ in the author's characteristic ironic mode on photography as a \ violation of personal dignity and privacy and the "revolutionary \ transformation" of a world that no longer honors such values. John \ McPhee's wonderfully original "The Search for Marvin Gardens" makes \ of the popular American board game an allegory of capitalist \ adventure, and rewards us with the unexpected discovery of the \ secluded middle-class bastion Marvin Gardens, the security-\ patrolled "suburb within a suburb" that is one's reward for winning \ the game.\ The earliest essay in the anthology, Mark Twain's "Corn-pone \ Opinions," is a superbly modulated argument that begins with an \ engaging portrait of a young black slave (this is the Missouri of \ Twain's childhood, in the 1850s) and proceeds to a ringing \ denunciation of cultural chauvinism that is as relevant to our time \ as it was to Twain's:\ Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly \ speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is \ acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is \ conformity.\ By which Twain means that deathly conformity that leads to an \ acceptance of slavery, lynchings, white bigotry, and injustice in a \ nation constituted as a democracy.\ Twain's essay strikes a chord that resounds through the \ anthology: the ever-shifting, ever-evolving issue of race in America. \ It can't be an accident that the 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. And what mightier, what more challenging and passionate theme \ for both writer and reader than how it feels to be of minority status \ in America, from the time of W.E.B. Du Bois in the first decade of \ the century to our contemporaries Maya Angelou, N. Scott Momaday, \ Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, and Gerald \ Early? For historical reasons obviously having to do with slavery, \ the experience of blacks in America has been significantly different \ from that of other minorities, and this fact is reflected in the \ essays included here.\ W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John," from The Souls of \ Black Folk (1903), is a chillingly prophetic work that traces the \ intellectual and spiritual evolution of a seemingly ordinary black \ boy from southeastern Georgia who is sent north to be educated in a \ Negro school, returns after seven years to his hometown so thoroughly \ changed that he seems more foreign to his former relatives and \ neighbors than a Georgian white man would be, and is given advice by \ the kindly white Judge:\ ". . . You and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must \ remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white \ men. In their place, you people can be honest and respectful; and God \ knows, I'll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse \ nature . . . by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every \ Nigger in the land."\ Zora Neale Hurston in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928) defines \ herself very differently from Du Bois's tragic protagonist, partly \ because she has been raised in a "colored town" in Florida, \ Eatonville. Her defiance strikes us as courageous, and touching:\ At certain times I have no race, I am me . . . Sometimes, I feel \ discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely \ astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my \ company! It's beyond me.\ Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical \ Sketch," the preface to Wright's 1938 collection of novellas, Uncle \ Tom's Children, would become a section of his heralded Black Boy \ (1945). Wright's education in Jim Crow "wisdom" begins ironically \ with a beating his mother gives him for having dared to fight with \ white boys, and carries him into a prematurely cynical adolescence; \ it's a vision of the American South contiguous with that of New York \ City in the 1940s experienced by Langston Hughes.\ Perhaps the preeminent essayist of the American twentieth \ century is James Baldwin, and it seems fitting that Baldwin wrote his \ most powerful and influential nonfiction works, Notes of a Native \ Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time, at about \ midcentury. Baldwin was a natural master of a kind of nonfiction \ narration we associate with the most engaging fiction, in which \ personal, familial experience is linked with a larger social and \ political context that enhances it as myth. Like his mentor Richard \ Wright, James Baldwin was a poet of irony; his bitterness and rage at \ social injustice was so finely distilled, his use of language so \ impassioned and fluent, he made of the most tragically debased \ materials a world of startling beauty. Baldwin's is a secular \ mystical vision that seems to us quintessentially American:\ All of my [newly deceased] father's texts and songs, which I had \ decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like \ empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them \ for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped . . . The dead \ man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not \ matter; to believe they did was to acquiesce in one's own \ destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to \ destroy the man who hated and this man was an immutable law.\ This is the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed in \ his historic 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "One who breaks an \ unjust law must do it openly, lovingly . . . and with a willingness \ to accept the penalty."\ \ Robert Atwan, who has been an invaluable series editor for the highly \ regarded The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986, \ assisted me tirelessly and with inspiration in our months-long effort \ of sifting through any and all essays that were possibilities for \ this anthology. We have been limited, or, one might say, assisted, in \ our selections only since 1986, being obliged to choose essays from \ the series anthology after that date; before 1986, we had no \ restrictions. Our decision to reprint essays only by writers who have \ published nonfiction books helped to limit our search, as did our \ exclusion of journalism, excepting unique reportage like \ Hemingway's "Pamplona in July" and Michael Herr's "Illumination \ Rounds." We hoped to avoid prose fiction in essay form, though such \ prose pieces as W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John" and Langston \ Hughes's "Bop" certainly employ fictional techniques; we excluded \ literary criticism - though some of our finest writers, like Randall \ Jarrell, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling, have excelled in it - \ and footnote-laden academic essays for a limited readership, even by \ Hannah Arendt. Much as I wanted to include Henry James, as I've noted \ above, I could not justify reprinting a long, convoluted skein of \ words that few readers would read. Nor could I include another major \ twentieth-century writer, Willa Cather, whose available essays were \ simply inappropriate, and lengthy. Of Norman Mailer's nonfiction \ work, "The Fight" would have been my choice for this volume, but it's \ book length (and has already appeared in The Best American Sports \ Writing of the Century); other essays of Mailer's, like "The White \ Negro," controversial in their time, are badly dated today. Gay \ Talese, a brilliant practitioner of what has come to be known as New \ Journalism, has written no "essays" per se. William Carlos Williams, \ Ralph Ellison, John Hersey, Wallace Stegner, Barbara Tuchman, Gore \ Vidal, most painfully William Faulkner: these important writers had \ no single appropriate essay. Faulkner in particular seems to have had \ little aptitude, or perhaps inspiration, for the essay form.\ Of contemporary essayists there are so many - so very many! - \ who might well be included here, it isn't possible to list their \ names except in the Appendix. Quite apart from the numerous memoirs \ of high quality being written today, and published to much acclaim, \ this is a remarkably fruitful era for the personal essay. The \ triumph, one might say, of the mysterious pronoun "I."\ It was the aim of the editors to tell a more or less \ chronological story of America as the century unfolded, with \ representative essays from each decade, as we have done; yet, the \ reader will note, the traumatic experiences of World War II, vividly \ described by William Manchester in "Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of \ All," does not appear in the forties but decades later, in 1987; and \ numerous other essays, stimulated by memory and meditation, have been \ written years after the occasion of their subjects. The ideal essay, \ in any case, is as timeless as any work of art, transcending the \ circumstances of its inception. It moves, as Robert Frost says of the \ ideal poem, from delight to wisdom, and "rides on its own melting," \ like ice on a hot stove.\ Joyce Carol Oates \ \ Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company\ Introduction copyright © 2000 by The Ontario Review Inc.\ All rights reserved

ForewordxIntroductionxvii1901: Corn-pone Opinions11903: Of the Coming of John61906: A Law of Acceleration201909: Stickeen281910: The Moral Equivalent of War451911: The Handicapped571912: Coatesville711916: The Devil Baby at Hull-House751919: Tradition and the Individual Talent901923: Pamplona in July981925: The Hills of Zion1071928: How It Feels to Be Colored Me1141933: The Old Stone House1181935: What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them1311936: The Crack-Up1391937: Sex Ex Machina1531937: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch1591938: Knoxville: Summer of 19151711939: The Figure a Poem Makes1761941: Once More to the Lake1791944: Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away1861949: Bop1901950: The Future Is Now1931953: Artists in Uniform1991955: The Marginal World2141955: Notes of a Native Son2201956: The Brown Wasps2391957: A Sweet Devouring2461961: A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails2521963: Letter from Birmingham Jail2631964: Putting Daddy On2801964: Notes on "Camp"2881966: Perfect Past3031967: The Way to Rainy Mountain3131968: The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King3191969: Illumination Rounds3271970: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings3421971: The Lives of a Cell3581972: The Search for Marvin Gardens3611972: The Doomed in Their Sinking3731975: No Name Woman3831975: Looking for Zora3951977: Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying4121979: The White Album4211980: Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood4471981: The Solace of Open Spaces4671982: Total Eclipse4771982: A Drugstore in Winter4901987: Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All4971988: Heaven and Nature5071989: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown5201990: Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant5321993: The Disposable Rocket5491995: They All Just Went Away5531997: Graven Images564Biographical Notes569AppendixNotable Twentieth-Century American Literary Nonfiction591

\ From Barnes & NobleBookseller Reviews \ These essays educate us, amuse us, startle us with their immediacy. Who among us can read Henry Adam's "A Law of Acceleration," penned in 1904, and not think of our mind-zapping digital age? Who could resist the first sentence of Zora Neale Hurston's piece:I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief." And which of you could disagree with the unrepeatable wisdom of Gertrude Stein's "The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting."\ The essays that Joyce Carol Oates has selected linger with us, not because their authors (from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King), retain their fame, but because each piece is a talisman, irreducible and well-carved. James Age's prose-poems "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" appeals to us today just as it inspired composer Samuel Barber decades ago, and two thirds of a century have only enhanced the thrall of the languorous rhythms of Edmund Wilson's "The Old Stone House." H.L. Mencken's article on the 1925 Scopes trial shames this week's pale convention prose with its freshness, and T.S. Eliot's 1919 "Tradition and The Individual Talent" still has something to teach us.\ \ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ "Here is a history of America told in many voices," declares Oates in her introduction, revealing the heart of her intelligent and incisive collection of 55 essays by American writers. Never attempting to capture or replicate a single, authentic "American identity," this collection succeeds by producing a comprehensive and multifaceted look at what America has been and, by extension, what it is and might become. While it's not explicitly political, the volume's multicultural intentions are visible. Beginning with "Cone-pone Opinions," a 1901 Mark Twain essay that uses the wisdom of an African-American child as its central image, Oates has fashioned a collection that calls attention to the way that "America" is made up of competing, and often antagonistic, cultural and social visions. There is not only the apparent contrast between the populist, overtly political visions of W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" and Mary McCarthy's "Artists in Uniform" and the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Oates has managed to find numerous pieces whose vision and philosophy resonate with one another without becoming homogeneous, so Gretel Ehrlich's meditation on pastoral aesthetics in "The Solace of Open Spaces" contrasts abruptly and ingeniously with Susan Sontag's urban-centered "Notes on Camp." In all, Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities. QPB and History Book Club selections; BOMC alternate. Sept. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ From The Critics". . . Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces \ reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of \ various American identities."\ \ \ \ \ KLIATTIn her excellent introduction to this collection, Joyce Carol Oates states her belief that "art should not be comforting." It should, instead, "provoke, disturb,...and expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." The reader should therefore be prepared to have these 55 carefully selected essays do just that. Arranged chronologically, the essays span the century with an average of five essays per decade. From Mark Twain to Saul Bellow by way of William James, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein, the collection notes literary trends as well as social upheavals as recorded in essays of W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Chosen from authors who had published at least one book of nonfiction or essays, this collection attempts to present a "mobile mosaic" of 20th-century America. Category: Collections. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Houghton Mifflin, 624p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Brookline, MA\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalOne of the pleasures of an anthology like this is reading people you might not otherwise have picked up. Like John Muir, whose "Stickeen," a life-and-death adventure on an Alaskan glacier with a singular small black dog, is a great piece of adventure writing. Or Jane Addams, whose insights into the spread of an urban legend of "The Devil Baby at Hull House" are thoughtful and compassionate. Another sort of pleasure comes from rereading familiar works in a new context: E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake," N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain," John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens," and Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse." Only seven of the essays come from the annual "Best American Essays" series that Atwan has coedited since 1986. The other 48 were culled from the rest of the century, with the ruling idea, Atwan says, "that the essays should speak to the present, not merely represent the past." Oates looked "for the expression of personal experience within the historical." They have created a mosaic of a century in an America whose dominant and recurring theme has been race. Essential for most libraries.--Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\\\ \ \ \ \ Megan Harlan...all the essays transcend fashion and speak just as eloquestly to us today as they did when they were first published.\ —Entertainment Weekly\ \