{"product_id":"the-glorious-american-essay-isbn-9780525436270","title":"The Glorious American Essay","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eA monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages.\" —Rivka Galchen, author of \u003ci\u003eAtmospheric Disturbances\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay. | \u003ci\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. \u003cb\u003eCotton Mather\u003c\/b\u003e, Of Poetry, and of Style (1726)\u003cbr\u003e 2. \u003cb\u003eJonathan Edwards\u003c\/b\u003e, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)\u003cbr\u003e 3. \u003cb\u003eThomas Paine\u003c\/b\u003e, Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (1776)\u003cbr\u003e 4. \u003cb\u003eJ. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur\u003c\/b\u003e, On the Situation, Feelings, and Pleasures, of an American Farmer (1782)\u003cbr\u003e 5. \u003cb\u003eBenjamin Franklin\u003c\/b\u003e, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784)\u003cbr\u003e 6. \u003cb\u003eAlexander Hamilton\u003c\/b\u003e, The Federalist No. 1 (1787)\u003cbr\u003e 7. \u003cb\u003eThomas Jefferson\u003c\/b\u003e, Religion (1787)\u003cbr\u003e 8. \u003cb\u003eJudith Sargent Murray\u003c\/b\u003e, On the Equality of the Sexes (1790)\u003cbr\u003e 9. \u003cb\u003eGeorge Washington\u003c\/b\u003e, Farewell Address (1796)\u003cbr\u003e 10. \u003cb\u003eWashington Irving\u003c\/b\u003e, The Author’s Account of Himself (1819).\u003cbr\u003e 11. \u003cb\u003eJohn James Audubon\u003c\/b\u003e, The Passenger Pigeon (1835)\u003cbr\u003e 12. \u003cb\u003eSarah Moore Grimké\u003c\/b\u003e, On the Condition of Women in the United States (1837)\u003cbr\u003e 13. \u003cb\u003eEdgar Allan Poe\u003c\/b\u003e, The Philosophy of Furniture (1840)\u003cbr\u003e 14. \u003cb\u003eNathaniel Hawthorne\u003c\/b\u003e, Fire-Worship (1843)\u003cbr\u003e 15. \u003cb\u003eRalph Waldo Emerson,\u003c\/b\u003e Experience (1844).\u003cbr\u003e 16. \u003cb\u003eMargaret Fuller,\u003c\/b\u003e from \u003ci\u003eWoman in the Nineteenth Century\u003c\/i\u003e (1845)\u003cbr\u003e 17. \u003cb\u003eFrederick Douglass\u003c\/b\u003e, To My Old Master, Thomas Auld (1848)\u003cbr\u003e 18. \u003cb\u003eHerman Melville,\u003c\/b\u003e Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)\u003cbr\u003e 19. \u003cb\u003eMartin R. Delany\u003c\/b\u003e, Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States (1852)\u003cbr\u003e 20. \u003cb\u003eHenry David Thoreau,\u003c\/b\u003e Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (1854)\u003cbr\u003e 21. \u003cb\u003eOliver Wendell Holmes\u003c\/b\u003e, from \u003ci\u003eThe Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table\u003c\/i\u003e (1858)\u003cbr\u003e 22. \u003cb\u003eAbraham Lincoln,\u003c\/b\u003e Second Inaugural Address (1865)\u003cbr\u003e 23. \u003cb\u003eFanny Fern\u003c\/b\u003e, “Delightful Men” (1870)\u003cbr\u003e 24. \u003cb\u003eWalt Whitman\u003c\/b\u003e, Death of Abraham Lincoln (1879)\u003cbr\u003e 25. \u003cb\u003eHenry James\u003c\/b\u003e, The Art of Fiction (1884)\u003cbr\u003e 26. \u003cb\u003eCharlotte Perkins Gilman\u003c\/b\u003e, On Advertising for Marriage (1885)\u003cbr\u003e 27. \u003cb\u003eSui Sin Far\u003c\/b\u003e, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1890)\u003cbr\u003e 28. \u003cb\u003eJane Addams\u003c\/b\u003e, The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (1892)\u003cbr\u003e 29. \u003cb\u003eElizabeth Cady Stanton\u003c\/b\u003e, The Solitude of Self (1892)\u003cbr\u003e 30. \u003cb\u003eJohn Muir\u003c\/b\u003e, A Wind-Storm in the Forests (1894)\u003cbr\u003e 31. \u003cb\u003eStephen Crane\u003c\/b\u003e, The Mexican Lower Classes (1895)\u003cbr\u003e 32. \u003cb\u003eWilliam Dean Howells\u003c\/b\u003e, The Country Printer (1896)\u003cbr\u003e 33. \u003cb\u003eJohn Burroughs\u003c\/b\u003e, The Art of Seeing Things (1899)\u003cbr\u003e 34. \u003cb\u003eWilliam James\u003c\/b\u003e, What Makes a Life Significant? (1900)\u003cbr\u003e 35. \u003cb\u003eW. E. B. Du Bois\u003c\/b\u003e, Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903)\u003cbr\u003e 36. \u003cb\u003eJohn Dewey\u003c\/b\u003e, Democracy in Education (1903)\u003cbr\u003e 37. \u003cb\u003eMary Austin\u003c\/b\u003e, The Basket Maker (1903)\u003cbr\u003e 38. \u003cb\u003eMark Twain\u003c\/b\u003e, The Turning Point of My Life (1910)\u003cbr\u003e 39. \u003cb\u003eRandolph Bourne\u003c\/b\u003e, The Handicapped (1911)\u003cbr\u003e 40. \u003cb\u003eJohn Jay Chapman\u003c\/b\u003e, Coatesville (1912)\u003cbr\u003e 41. \u003cb\u003eAgnes Repplier\u003c\/b\u003e, The Grocer’s Cat (1912)\u003cbr\u003e 42. \u003cb\u003eGeorge Santayana\u003c\/b\u003e, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1913)\u003cbr\u003e 43. \u003cb\u003eEdith Wharton,\u003c\/b\u003e America at War (1918)\u003cbr\u003e 44. \u003cb\u003eRobert Cortes Holliday\u003c\/b\u003e, An Article Without an Idea (1919)\u003cbr\u003e 45. \u003cb\u003eDorothy Parker,\u003c\/b\u003e Good Souls (1919)\u003cbr\u003e 46. \u003cb\u003eFinley Peter Dunne\u003c\/b\u003e, The Prohibition Era (1920)\u003cbr\u003e 47. \u003cb\u003eWilla Cather,\u003c\/b\u003e 148 Charles Street (1922)\u003cbr\u003e 48. \u003cb\u003eTheodore Dreiser,\u003c\/b\u003e The City of My Dreams (1923)\u003cbr\u003e 49. \u003cb\u003eChristopher Morley\u003c\/b\u003e, Intellectuals and Roughnecks (1923)\u003cbr\u003e 50. \u003cb\u003eH. L. Mencken\u003c\/b\u003e, The Hills of Zion (1925)\u003cbr\u003e 51. \u003cb\u003eJames Weldon Johnson,\u003c\/b\u003e The Dilemma of the Negro Author (1928)\u003cbr\u003e 52. \u003cb\u003eZora Neale Hurston\u003c\/b\u003e, How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)\u003cbr\u003e 53. \u003cb\u003eJames Thurber,\u003c\/b\u003e The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism (1929)\u003cbr\u003e 54. \u003cb\u003eAlbert Einstein,\u003c\/b\u003e The World as I See It (1931)\u003cbr\u003e 55. \u003cb\u003eKenneth Burke\u003c\/b\u003e, The Status of Art (1931)\u003cbr\u003e 56. \u003cb\u003eF. Scott Fitzgerald\u003c\/b\u003e, My Lost City (1932)\u003cbr\u003e 57. \u003cb\u003eEmma Goldman\u003c\/b\u003e, Was My Life Worth Living? (1934)\u003cbr\u003e 58. \u003cb\u003eKatharine Fullerton Gerould\u003c\/b\u003e, An Essay on Essays (1935)\u003cbr\u003e 59. \u003cb\u003eGertrude Stein,\u003c\/b\u003e What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them? (1936)\u003cbr\u003e 60. \u003cb\u003eM. F. K. Fisher\u003c\/b\u003e, Meals for Me (1937)\u003cbr\u003e 61. \u003cb\u003eLewis Mumford\u003c\/b\u003e, A New York Adolescence (1937)\u003cbr\u003e 62. \u003cb\u003eEdmund Wilson\u003c\/b\u003e, John Jay Chapman (1938)\u003cbr\u003e 63. \u003cb\u003eWilliam Saroyan\u003c\/b\u003e, Fragments (1938)\u003cbr\u003e 64. \u003cb\u003eClement Greenberg,\u003c\/b\u003e Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)\u003cbr\u003e 65. \u003cb\u003eEudora Welty\u003c\/b\u003e, Ida M’Toy (1942)\u003cbr\u003e 66. \u003cb\u003eHannah Arendt\u003c\/b\u003e, We Refugees (1943)\u003cbr\u003e 67. \u003cb\u003eMary McCarthy,\u003c\/b\u003e America the Beautiful (1947)\u003cbr\u003e 68. \u003cb\u003eE. B. White,\u003c\/b\u003e Death of a Pig (1947)\u003cbr\u003e 69. \u003cb\u003eJames Baldwin\u003c\/b\u003e, Equal in Paris (1955)\u003cbr\u003e 70. \u003cb\u003eNorman Mailer,\u003c\/b\u003e The Homosexual Villain (1955)\u003cbr\u003e 71. \u003cb\u003eRachel Carson,\u003c\/b\u003e The Marginal World (1955)\u003cbr\u003e 72. \u003cb\u003eJohn Brinckerhoff Jackson,\u003c\/b\u003e The Stranger’s Path (1957)\u003cbr\u003e 73. \u003cb\u003ePaul Tillich\u003c\/b\u003e, Invocation: The Lost Dimension in Religion (1958)\u003cbr\u003e 74. \u003cb\u003eSusan Sontag,\u003c\/b\u003e Against Interpretation (1964)\u003cbr\u003e 75. \u003cb\u003eJoan Didion\u003c\/b\u003e, Notes from a Native Daughter (1965)\u003cbr\u003e 76. \u003cb\u003eMartin Luther King Jr.,\u003c\/b\u003e Beyond Vietnam (1967)\u003cbr\u003e 77. \u003cb\u003eRalph Ellison\u003c\/b\u003e, What America Would Be Like Without Blacks (1970)\u003cbr\u003e 78. \u003cb\u003eLoren Eiseley\u003c\/b\u003e, The Brown Wasps (1971)\u003cbr\u003e 79. \u003cb\u003eNora Ephron\u003c\/b\u003e, A Few Words About Breasts (1972)\u003cbr\u003e 80. \u003cb\u003eLewis Thomas\u003c\/b\u003e, The Lives of a Cell (1974)\u003cbr\u003e 81. \u003cb\u003eAnnie Dillard\u003c\/b\u003e, On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley (1974)\u003cbr\u003e 82. \u003cb\u003eAdrienne Rich\u003c\/b\u003e, Women and Honor (1975)\u003cbr\u003e 83. \u003cb\u003eElizabeth Hardwick,\u003c\/b\u003e Billie Holiday (1976)\u003cbr\u003e 84. \u003cb\u003eEdward Abbey\u003c\/b\u003e, The Great American Desert (1977)\u003cbr\u003e 85. \u003cb\u003eWilliam H. Gass\u003c\/b\u003e, On Talking to Oneself (1979)\u003cbr\u003e 86. \u003cb\u003eWallace Stegner,\u003c\/b\u003e The Twilight of Self-Reliance (1980)\u003cbr\u003e 87. \u003cb\u003eCynthia Ozick\u003c\/b\u003e, A Drugstore in Winter (1982)\u003cbr\u003e 88. \u003cb\u003eAudre Lorde\u003c\/b\u003e, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1983)\u003cbr\u003e 89. \u003cb\u003eRolando Hinojosa\u003c\/b\u003e, This Writer’s Sense of Place (1983)\u003cbr\u003e 90. \u003cb\u003eNancy Mairs,\u003c\/b\u003e On Being a Cripple (1986)\u003cbr\u003e 91. \u003cb\u003eGuy Davenport,\u003c\/b\u003e On Reading (1987)\u003cbr\u003e 92. \u003cb\u003eN. Scott Momaday\u003c\/b\u003e, The Native Voice in American Literature (1988)\u003cbr\u003e 93. \u003cb\u003eMarilynne Robinson\u003c\/b\u003e, Puritans and Prigs (1994)\u003cbr\u003e 94. \u003cb\u003eJamaica Kincaid,\u003c\/b\u003e In History (1997)\u003cbr\u003e 95. \u003cb\u003eVivian Gornick,\u003c\/b\u003e The Princess and the Pea (1997)\u003cbr\u003e 96. \u003cb\u003eDavid Foster Wallace\u003c\/b\u003e, The View from Mrs. Thompson’s (2001)\u003cbr\u003e 97. \u003cb\u003eRichard Rodriguez,\u003c\/b\u003e Hispanic (2002)\u003cbr\u003e 98. \u003cb\u003eWayne Koestenbaum\u003c\/b\u003e, My 1980s (2003)\u003cbr\u003e 99. \u003cb\u003eLeonard Michaels\u003c\/b\u003e, My Yiddish (2003)\u003cbr\u003e 100. \u003cb\u003eZadie Smith\u003c\/b\u003e, Speaking in Tongues (2008) | “An endlessly fortifying mixture of famous works and neglected gems that can take pride of place on anyone's bedside table for months before its pleasures come close to being exhausted.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A treasure trove, a word hoard, a bonanza, perfect for dipping into and rifling through. . . .  Lopate has amassed a heap of marvels. . . .  A superb guide to the nation’s most adventurous and searching forays into prose.”\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eight hundred pages of mostly delight and edification. . . . Give in to its choral quality and it's easy to feel not just the sweep of our centuries but the dialogical nature of our grandest ideas and most persistent struggles.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An almost embarrassing abundance of riches. . . . Readers of Lopate’s seminal 1994 anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay” will already be familiar with his skill at picking pieces that perfectly offset and interrogate each other. Diving into one of his collections is always a delightful experience.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eC\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ehristian Science Monitor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A feast of American thought, wit, and wisdom.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eMilwaukee Journal Sentinel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Phillip Lopate has captured the history of a nation speaking to itself and to the world. Lopate's rich and expansive understanding of the form has allowed him to uncover the essayistic voice in unexpected places—the sermon, the eulogy, the political treatise. To read \u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay\u003c\/i\u003e is to envision the American experiment itself as a kind of essay, a narrative characterized by trial and error, triumphs and false starts. One comes away from this volume with a renewed sense of the essay's vitality and its ability to capture the diverse and evolving consciousness of a country.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eMeghan O’Gieblyn, author of \u003ci\u003eInterior States\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “In this essential and, I daresay, definitive compendium, Phillip Lopate not only revisits the classics, he offers essays you might not have realized were essays: political speeches, historical documents, the musings of writers who probably had little idea at the time that they were creating lasting art. In doing so, Lopate captures what’s most magical about this form; it’s all around us at eye level—wherever there are words you can probably find an essay—yet the right hands can take it to places you never imagined.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eMeghan Daum, author of \u003ci\u003eMy Misspent Youth: Essays \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The essay form models the way we need to live now. We need to think and feel in so many directions, reject easy dogmas, test our beliefs and desires. . . . Once again and right on time, Phillip Lopate offers an indispensable anthology. \u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay \u003c\/i\u003etravels from debate to dreamscape, manifesto to musing, from the struggles of history to the intimacies of the solitary self. Race, gender, science, religion, art, and identity: these quests and conflicts are our legacy as Americans.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Margo Jefferson, author of\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003ci\u003eNegroland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“A sumptuous collection . . . exquisitely curated by one of our finest essayists. An indispensable resource for all of us who love the genre.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Robert Atwan, series editor of\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Best American Essays\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Glorious American Essay\u003c\/i\u003e is, quite simply, glorious reading. Lopate has curated a collection of some of the best American essays ever written. . . [T]he book demonstrates the art, the power, the beauty and the cinematic scope of the American essay in its many forms.  Lopate's introduction is a vital, eye-opening assessment of the potential and the impact of the essay and the ways in which nonfiction can inform, persuade, delight, surprise and, most importantly, enlighten the reader.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Lee Gutkind, author of \u003ci\u003eMy Last Eight Thousand Days\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay\u003c\/i\u003e situates the essay, an inherently democratic form of art, as the citizen-genre and nothing less than the literary cornerstone of the country. The mongrel nature of the essay is its strength: a mode of adaptability fit for differing, shifting, American ideals. This book could hardly be more timely, relevant, urgent, or necessary.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—David Shields, author of \u003ci\u003eReality Hunger\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lopate’s look at three centuries of essays emphasizes how writers have wrestled, explicitly or sub-textually, with America’s national values.” \u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly’s\u003c\/i\u003e TOP 10 new titles in Essays \u0026amp; Literary Criticism    \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I can’t think of anyone better suited than Phillip Lopate to put together an anthology like this. It fully deserves to takes its place alongside \u003ci\u003eThe Art of the Personal Essay\u003c\/i\u003e as an indispensable volume.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Geoff Dyer, author of \u003ci\u003eBroadsword Calling Danny Boy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Phillip Lopate is one of the most brilliant and original essayists now working. . . . He has sustained the lively openness of the student who observes and hypothesizes, refusing, admirably, to harden into the judge. . . . He is a master, and also a joy to read.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Louise Glück\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Phillip Lopate has earned his place at the center of our literary culture. A superb essayist, he also teaches, edits, [and] bestows order and perspective on this ever diversifying genre. \u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay, \u003c\/i\u003eshowcases some of the best of what Whitman in another context called ‘our varied carols.’” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sven Birkerts\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eauthor \u003ci\u003eof The Gutenberg Elegies \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Art of Time in Memoir\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A is a thrilling tour through that most elusive jungle—the American Mind—over the course of nearly 300 years. There could be no better guide than Phillip Lopate. An invaluable anthology. It should be included in the library of anyone who has even a passing interest in American literature.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Michael Greenberg, author of\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHurry Down Sunshine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e“As we struggle to come to grips with where America has come from and where it is heading, I can’t imagine a better guide than Phillip Lopate’s \u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay\u003c\/i\u003e. His selection of incisive essays—from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Marilynne Robinson and Zadie Smith—charts the course of the great and flawed American experiment.  It’s a timely and invaluable anthology.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—James Shapiro, author of \u003ci\u003eShakespeare in a Divided America\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What’s marvelous is the way Lopate’s anthologies—and this new American collection is no exception—manage to be not only comprehensive monuments of deep expertise, but such continuously fresh and thrilling reading companions, right through the biographical notes.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Lethem, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Feral Detective\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Shaped by Phillip Lopate's tremendous intellect and curiosity, \u003ci\u003eThe Glorious American Essay\u003c\/i\u003e is at once monumental and companionable. The American house of prose has more windows and doors than we had imagined, making this anthology not only an education, but a joy. This is a book for the ages.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Rivka Galchen, author of \u003ci\u003eAtmospheric Disturbances\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e | \u003cb\u003ePHILLIP LOPATE\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eTo Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction\u003c\/i\u003e and four essay collections: \u003ci\u003eBachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003ePortrait Inside My Head\u003c\/i\u003e. He is the editor of the anthologies \u003ci\u003eThe Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAmerican Movie Critics\u003c\/i\u003e. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a professor of writing at Columbia University's nonfiction MFA program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. | INTRODUCTION\u003cbr\u003e I\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The essay is a literary form dating back to ancient times, with a long and glorious history. As the record \u003ci\u003epar excellence \u003c\/i\u003eof a mind tracking its thoughts, it can be considered the intellectual bellwether of any modern society. The great promise of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one’s readers and literary forebears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling literary style. Flexible, shape-shifting, experimental, as befits its name derived from the French (\u003ci\u003eessai \u003c\/i\u003e= “attempt”), it is nothing if not versatile.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In the United States, the essay has had a particularly illustrious if underexamined career. In fact, it is possible to see the dual histories of the country and the literary form as running on parallel tracks, the essay mulling current issues and thereby reflecting the story of the United States in each succeeding period. And just as American democracy has been an ongoing experiment, with no guarantees of perfection, so has the essay been, as William Dean Howells argued, an innately democratic form inviting all comers to say their piece, however imperfectly.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The Puritans, some of our earliest settlers, chose the essay over fiction and poetry as their preferred mode of expression. In both sermons and texts explicitly labeled “essays,” men like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards articulated their religious and ethical values. Many later American commentators would take them to task for being sexually prudish, intolerant, and repressive. H. L. Mencken, in a scathing extended essay entitled “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” blamed that heritage for holding back American literature by overstressing behavioral proprieties while understressing aesthetics. Edmund Wilson wittily noted that Mencken himself was something of a Puritan. The bohemian wing of American literature, from Walt Whitman to the present, has engaged in protracted guerrilla warfare with Puritanism and offered itself as an alternative. On the other hand, Marilynne Robinson defends the Puritans from what she regards as a caricature of their positions. Say what you will about their rigid morality: these Puritan thinkers were highly learned, with sophisticated prose styles, and we are fortunate in having them set so high an intellectual standard for later American essayists to follow.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Skip ahead to the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, all of whom seem to have been superb writers. In their treatises, pamphlets, speeches, letters, and broadsides, they tested their tentative views on politics and governance, hoping to move from conviction to certainty. Theirs was a self-conscious rhetoric influenced by the French Enlightenment authors and the orators of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the polished eighteenth-century nonfiction prose writers of their opponent, Great Britain.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In the decades following independence, United States authors labored to free themselves from subservience to English parental literary influence and to establish a national culture that would sound somehow unmistakably American. Washington Irving, perhaps the first freelance American author to support himself by his pen, was ridiculed by British critics such as William Hazlitt for imitating the English periodical essayists. He, in turn, wrote an essay entitled “English Writers in America,” which began: “It is with feelings of deep regret that I observe the literary animosity daily growing up between England and America.” He went on to analyze the condescending travel accounts of English authors in America, which were then all the rage in Great Britain: “That such men should give prejudiced accounts of America is not a matter of surprize. The themes it offers for contemplation are too vast and elevated for their capacities. The national character is yet in a state of fermentation: it may have its frothings and sediment, but its ingredients are sound and wholesome; it has already given proofs of powerful and generous qualities, and the whole promises to settle down into something substantially excellent.” Edgar Allan Poe bristled at the canard that Americans were too materialistic and engineering-minded to produce literature: “Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make rail-roads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse. . . . But this is the purest insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him . . . nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, our greatest nineteenth-century essayist, who sounded the alarm most famously in his speech “The American Scholar.” Acknowledging that up to then the Americans were “a people too busy to give to letters more,” he nevertheless prophesied that the time was coming “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.” He concluded by saying: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds.” It’s worthwhile remembering that this author who called for independence from foreign culture was probably the best-read person of his time and had imbibed not only most of British, French, and German literature but Eastern religious classics as well.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Emerson developed a kind of essay that was quirky, densely complex, speculative, digressive, and epigrammatic. He was part of that extraordinary flowering of literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century, the so-called American Renaissance, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson. By the time it had run its course, there was no longer any doubt that America had itself a national culture. But there was more at stake than just the development of literary talent. The nation was facing enormous political and moral challenges from the twin oppressions of blacks and women. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which called for runaway slaves to be captured by northerners and returned as property to their southern slave owners, converted many of these writers to the abolitionist cause. Some of the most eloquent essays attacking slavery were penned by African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany. They engendered an essayistic discourse on race that would be taken up by a distinguished lineage of black authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, continuing into our present day.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Meanwhile, women of the nineteenth century, still denied the vote and other rights, were barred from many professions, patronized, physically abused, and oppressed. It is remarkable how far back in America feminist voices were heard, from Judith Sargent Murray’s 1790 “On the Equality of the Sexes” to Margaret Fuller to Sarah Moore Grimké and Fanny Fern, reaching a high point in the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s great essay, “The Solitude of Self,” and sweeping forward to the twentieth century. The essay, once considered a male province, has been nourished by the mental toughness and emotional honesty of so many bold, brilliant women in the last hundred years: think of Mary McCarthy, Hannah\u003cbr\u003e Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Zadie Smith. . . .\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Even when suffrage was extended to blacks and women, there was still the problem of completing democracy by transforming it from a merely legal form to an everyday reality for all classes and groups. So John Dewey argued for students and teachers to have more of a voice in determining educational policy; Jane Addams addressed in her settlement house movement the problems of young people thrown together as strangers in big cities; and Randolph Bourne put forward his vision of a “trans-national America” that would embrace the diversity of immigrants from other than Anglo-Saxon backgrounds.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Whenever the American essay has been unhitched from the urgent political and moral issues of the day, it has had to battle to stay commercially relevant. A specialty of the personal or familiar essay, in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Robert Louis Stevenson, is to focus on some seemingly small, trivial curiosity or annoyance of daily life, and to coax a larger significance from it. Some of the essayists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Agnes Repplier and Katharine Fullerton Gerould, excelled at this miniaturist belletristic form and found a home in magazines, but they also had to defend their work from charges that it was “genteel” or old-fashioned. The death of the essay was frequently if prematurely predicted. In 1919 Robert Cortes Holliday wrote good-humoredly: “It is said that essays are coming in again. Every once in a while someone says that. It is like prophecies concerning the immediate end of the world. However, it (either one of these prophecies) may be so this time.” (How pertinent those remarks are may be seen by examining our own recent history. Publishers twenty-five years ago treated essay collections as pariahs and would not touch the stuff. Since then, essays have come roaring back, and today there are dozens of collections exciting popular interest. But that could easily change, in which case essayists would again have to package their wares in some other disguise.)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One of the ways that the American essay kept alive in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s was to gravitate to the newspaper or magazine column, often in the guise of humor pieces. A fraternal order of such practitioners, which included Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, and Heywood Broun, called themselves facetiously the “colyumnists.” Masters of the six-hundred-word essay, they were very popular, especially in metropolitan settings, and set the agenda for the talk of the town. Their seemingly casual throwaway tone, “typical Joe” persona, and modest claims as literary artists belied the fact that they were all highly educated in the traditions of the English periodical essay.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e At the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum, as far from the average Joe as possible, was H. L. Mencken, who employed an elevated, at times comically baroque, diction and took every opportunity to sneer at the provincial ignorance of the average American. In the Age of Mencken, roughly the 1920s, many writers felt alienated from American mass culture: some went abroad to Europe, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, to absorb a more sophisticated, worldly ambience, while others stayed home and tried to raise the cultural level. (The critic Alfred Kazin spoke of “our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.”) This lovers’ quarrel between America and its writers initially took the form of a mistrust of the masses and, later on, a wary suspicion about how consumerist mass culture would shape the people’s mentalities. It was also a protest against the shortcomings of the American dream, or at least its bland, self-satisfied complacencies. The discordant note struck by many native essayists regarding the mythologies of American exceptionalism may have sprung from the artists’ felt obligation to question received opinion.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Many of the essays chosen for this anthology address themselves specifically—sometimes lovingly, sometimes critically—to American values. (See, for instance, the pieces by George Santayana, Mary McCarthy, and Wallace Stegner, each taking America’s temperature.) But even those that do not do so have a secondary, if inadvertent, subtext about being American. E. B. White was an influential example of an essayist who conveyed, in a down-to-earth American tone, the average citizen’s preoccupations at home, while remaining aware of the larger challenges facing society.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In a United States where various groups have felt marginalized because of their ethnicity, national origin, gender, geographical location, or disability, members of these groups have increasingly turned to the essay as a means of asserting identity (or complicating it). Gerald Early, in his anthology \u003ci\u003eSpeech and Power, \u003c\/i\u003ewrote: “Since black writing came of age in this country in the 1920s, the essay seems to be the informing genre behind it. . . . It is not surprising that many black writers have been attracted to the essay as a literary form since the essay is the most exploitable mode of the confession and the polemic, the two variants of the essay that black writers have mostly used.” The same could be said for other minority groups in American society, who have benefited the essay form immeasurably by adapting it to their purposes, enriching the American language with their dialect-flavored speech. They have contributed to the “cultural unity within diversity” ideal that Ralph Ellison envisioned for this country. At the same time, the American essay has taken a turn toward greater autobiographical frankness, thanks in part to their efforts.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Another skein of essay writing, of unarguable importance now that the planet finds itself endangered by climate change, is nature writing. In America, that tradition goes back at least as far as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and extends to John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, John Burroughs, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard, among others. We see in it an attempt to balance the factual and descriptive elements of flora and fauna with a fresh emotional access to wonder and awe. However alarmed these essayists may sound in their warnings of the threats to nature, there is still looming underneath an appeal to the original myth of America as the New World, a second Garden of Eden where humankind could finally get it right.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e II\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But wait: What \u003ci\u003eis \u003c\/i\u003ean essay? Many definitions have been proffered, none conclusive. Samuel Johnson called it “a loose sally of the mind.” Marilynne Robinson said it was “thought in the pure enjoyment of itself.” Chris Arthur wrote that “an essay is a literary electrocardiogram that traces out in words the pulse of thoughts” and “an essay arranges words with one eye on sense, one eye on style, and a third eye on wisdom.” R. P. Blackmur called it a form of “unindoctrinated thinking,” making it especially well suited to doubt, inconclusiveness, skepticism, and contrarian views. Not that it necessarily has to be inconclusive. We deduce from all this that it has something to do with tracking thought. Some have maintained that the essay must have an argument, must instruct; others, that essays must \u003ci\u003enot \u003c\/i\u003edo either. According to Agnes Repplier, “It offers no instruction, save through the medium of enjoyment, and one saunters lazily along with a charming unconsciousness of effort.” That is one","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338551439589,"sku":"NP9780525436270","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525436270.jpg?v=1769572654","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-glorious-american-essay-isbn-9780525436270","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}