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 The Best American Essays of the Century
Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
with Robert Atwan
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000
596 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction to this volume, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition." Along with Robert Atwan, who has overseen the acclaimed Best American Essays series since its inception in 1986, Oates has chosen a list of works that are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address.
This collection honors some of the twentieth century's best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and others. The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about "The Lives of a Cell," Rachel Carson mulls "The Marginal World," and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown."
Taken together, these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going."
Reviews
- Booklist, August, 2000, p2097
- Library Journal, August 2000, p102
- School Library Journal, December 2000, p64
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Contents
Foreword / by Robert Atwan
Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates
Cort-pone opinions / Mark Twain
Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois
A law of acceleration / Henry Adams
Stickeen / John Muir
The moral equivalent of war / Wiiliam James
The handicapped / Randolph Bourne
Coatesville / John Jay Chapman
The devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams
Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot
Pamplona in July / Ernest Henigway
The hills of Zion / H.L. Mensken
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston
The old stone house / Edmund Wilson
What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein
The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber
The ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee
The figure a poem makes / Robert Frost
Once more to the lake / E.B. White
Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman
Bop / Langston Hughes
The future is now / Katherine Anne Porter
Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy
The marginal world / Rachel Carson
Notes of a native son / James Baldwin
The brown wasps / Loren Eiseley
A sweet devouring / Eudora Welty
A hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall
Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr.
Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe
Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag
Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov
The way to rainy mountain / N. Scott Momaday
The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick
Illumination rounds / Michael Herr
I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou
The lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas
The search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee
The doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston
Looking for Zora / Alice Walker
Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich
The white album / Joan Didion
Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez
The solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich
Total eclipse / Annie Dillard
A drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick
Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester
Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland
The creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould
Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early
The disposable rocket / John Updike
They all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates
Graven images / Saul Bellow
Biographical notes
Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction. |
Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/anthologies/century.html
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