The Best American Essays of the Century

Joyce Carol Oates is not simply a prolific writer, she is also a tremendously 'prolific' reader. In this selection of the best American essays of the century, she and her co- editor series editor Robert Atwan choose many of the most important American essays of the century. If I just think of those I know beforehand there is William James famous ' The Moral Equivalent of War' which talks about the place of sport in American life. There is perhaps the most well- known literary essay of the century T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in which he argues that each new literary work of significance redefines the whole Tradition, makes us see it all in a new way. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald's tremendously moving personal essay on his own breakdown,'The Crack-up' in which he tells us ' in the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning. There is James Baldwin's searing essay, 'Notes of a Native Son' and Mark Twain telling us in 'Corn-pone' that where the person gets his core- pone is where his opinions is. It is a typical humorous and brilliant Twain attack on the common-sense conventional mind, and a call for the kind of independent thinking he in his work so exemplified. There are a considerable number of essays on race, on the condition of the blacks in America. Richard Wright, Zola Hurston, Baldwin, Maya Angelou. There are outstanding essays on science by Lewis Thomas, Stephen J. Gould, Oliver Sachs. There are literary explorations and explorations of the American lanscape and mind. Among the other writers included are Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Tom Wofe, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick ,William Manchester, John Updike, Saul Bellow, James Agee, John Jay Chapman, John Muir, Nabovkov, Edwin Hoagland, Willam Gass, Hemingway, Elizabeth Hardwick, S.J. Perelman, Gertrude Stein, Thurber, E.B. White , Oates herself and many others. It may not contain all the best, and it may not all be good, but much of it is the best, and a good share very good indeed.

I don't think I'm alone in viewing essays as members of a somewhat lower caste than novels and non-fiction books. Maybe it's because I associate the essay with newspapers, and people like George Will who pretend to know more than their readers. I think the editors of this essay collection understood that popular conception, and tried very hard to fight it. In line with that fight, one of the organizing themes of this book seems to be ``Essays About Individual Experiences." True, many of the essays take individual experiences and move into a more general realm, but they're always grounded in the author's experiences. Contrast this with George Will - Trinity College undergrad, Princeton grad school in political science - writing essays about poverty and policy. There's more legitimacy - in my mind, anyway - in Richard Wright writing an essay about ``The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."Many of the essays in this book, like Wright's, are on the subject of race in America. We have Zora Neale Hurston's ``How It Feels To Be Colored 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."); Alice Walker's ``Looking For Zora," on her attempts to find Hurston's lonely, abandoned, unkempt gravestone in Florida; Maya Angelou's ``I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" (later part of a book of the same name); Martin Luther King's ``Letter From Birmingham Jail"; and so forth. As the editors suggest, race has been one of the longest-running struggles in the United States; it shouldn't surprise us that it has produced works of such power. The autobiographical format of these essays particularly fits with their subject matter. That format works a lot better than, say, a collection of statistics (however truthful those statistics might be)._Best American Essays_ is far more than a book about race, however. It contains some hilarious essays, like S.J. Perelman's ``Insert Flap `A' and Throw Away" (on his attempts to put together toys for his kids); an essay on bullfighting (Hemingway's ``Pamplona in July"); essays about suicide (``The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William H. Gass's ``The Doomed In Their Sinking", Edward Hoagland's ``Heaven and Nature"); Stephen Jay Gould on why humans seem to need to divide a complex continuum into a discrete beginning and end (``The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"); and on and on. All of them are almost crystalline in their density of information. All of them left me, after 10 or 12 pages, reeling as though I'd just set down a novel.I'm particularly fond of William Manchester's essay memorializing the battle of Okinawa (``Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle Of All"). I normally enter essays about war with a large dose of skepticism and revulsion, and this one was no different. ``Great," I thought, ``Manchester was a vet, so this will be another essay about the glory of armed combat." It is nothing at all like that. To use a ni

Many would regard the task of selecting "The Best American Essays of the Century" as a most daunting honor, to be approached with much nail biting and trepidation. Whatever you choose, dissenters will howl. Oates, no shirker when it comes to hard work and firm opinions, offers her choices with confidence. "My preference was always to essays that, springing from intense personal experience, are nonetheless significantly linked to larger issues."Arranged chronologically, the essays lean heavily toward reflections on the human condition within American culture. The writing is, without exception, eloquent and insightful. Race is a pervasive theme and inspires the most powerful pieces. The best essay in the book is James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son;" visceral and intimate, full of pain, bewilderment and searing honesty, whole of heart and intellect. Pieces by Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Langston Hughes, no matter how familiar, still shiver the soul with the conjunction of powerful intellect, soul-searing experience and the intimacy of an articulate voice.My second favorite essay could hardly be more different. John Muir's "Stickeen," has it all: adventure, peril, pathos, the passion for nature and exploration, and the curious relationship between man and dog; a rousing good story.Other themes place the writer in his contemporary culture; F. Scott Fitzgerald wrestling with despair, Jane Addams contemplating the downtrodden old women who comfort themselves with myths, Katherine Anne Porter internalizing the atom bomb, Tom Wolfe escorting a settled man to his rebellious son's slum apartment, Randolph Bourne exploring how his crippling disabilities have shaped his life, Mary McCarthy confronting anti-Semitism in a railroad club car.Some find a kernel of sharp insight in a childhood memory: James Agee recalling his undefined place in the tableau of a summer night, Eudora Welty on her early reading habits, E.B. White facing mortality while revisiting a boyhood camp with his son, Edmund Wilson taking stock of the old stone house in the bleak Adirondacks only to discover he has carried it with him all his life, Cynthia Ozick devouring books in her parents' depression-era drug store, Vladimir Nabokov probing the awakening of consciousness in his Russian boyhood.There are literary essays, but they are not the strongest: T.S. Eliot on tradition in literature, Robert Frost on sound and meaning, Susan Sontag defining "camp." And there are gaps. Joan Didion's "White Album" explores the confusion of the 60s, but there are no real political essays. The women's movement, save for a didactic Adrienne Rich piece, might never have happened, ditto for Watergate and even World War I. There are only two war pieces: harrowing Vietnam reportage from Michael Herr and William Manchester's thoughtful response to the Okinawa War Memorial. The immigrant experience is represented by Richard Rodriguez' reflection on th

Let's face it, you're a nut for non-fiction or you wouldn't be reading this. As a concession to the shortness of life you should read more essays and fewer monographs (i.e., book-length essays). Robert Atwan, series editor of the annual Best American Essays, is the undisputed monarch of the American Essay; here he has put his stupendous knowledge of the form at our service by selecting the best of the best for the past 100 years. The collection is delicious and variegated; as you dip in from time to time it will leave you filled without feeling stuffed. Forget all those books you've bought that you haven't cracked -- this one you're going to read!