Best American Essays of the Century [Paperback]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO@ (2000)
• ASIN: B001JVYNS4
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Reading -- if not the "Best:", January 4, 2001

By 

charles falk (Novato, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Essays of the Century (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful collection of essays that gave me several hours of reading pleasure. I take strong exception, however, to the use of "Best" in the title. Another Amoazon reviewer says it is the only book of essays one need ever buy. Both claims greatly exceed the load-bearing capacity of the 55 essays included. It is an impossible task to reduce a century's worth of essays down to a handful that are "best". If Joyce Carol Oates and her co-editor Robert Atwan had called it "Some of the Best American Essays of the Century" I would have no quarrel with them. Some of the selections strain the definition of "essay", but are marvelous pieces of writing, nevertheless.

Mark Twain's "Corn-pone Opinions" leads off. "'You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I"ll tell you what his 'pinion is'". Ms Oates says Twain is making a "ringing denunciation of cultural chauvinism". I read Twain as saying we are all captives of the conformity we accept as the price for the approval of our peers. Either way the editors are as guilty of "corn-pone opinions" as any of us. More than a third of the pieces are by famous authors -- best-known for their fiction and poetry rather than for their essays. Writers who worked primarily in the essay form are badly under-represented, e.g. Hannah Arendt, Dwight McDonald, Roger Angell, Jaques Barzun, AJ Liebling, MFK Fisher, Lewis Lapham, Noel Perrin, Nati Hentoff, Walter Lippmann, VS Naipul, Calvin Trillin, Andrew Tobias, and Gary Wills. Atwan appends a bibliography of 200 "notable" authors excluded from the collection.

Oates says her collection's theme is the "...expression of personal experience within the historical". One can measure her interest in the historical issues and events of the 20th century by tabulating the essays devoted to them: racial and ethnic issues -- high; politics -- nil; social problems -- high; sex and gender problems -- low; literary matters -- high; sports and popular culture -- low. Only two are about the dozen wars Americans fought during the century, both of them brilliant: William Manchester on the good war and Michael Herr on the bad war. Oates includes TS Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", calling it one of the "two most important literary essays of the twentieth century". It may have seemed so when she was a student, but Eliot's theory of literary criticism has about the same relevance at the end of the century as William Jennings Bryan's silver standard.

55 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one woman's eloquent collection, October 1, 2001

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Essays of the Century (Hardcover)

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 the pain and promise of becoming Americanized and Maxine Hong Kingston's poignant story of a shunned Chinese aunt, a long-ago suicide. Science is almost completely absent, save Stephen Jay Gould on the creation myth and Lewis Thomas' famous, brief essay "The Lives of a Cell." There's no political satire and no history, except as autobiography is history. But there are two essays dealing with suicide (William H. Gass, Edward Hoagland).

This is one person's careful collection of a century's important voices. All of the writers are well known, all have published at least one collection of essays, all of the pieces have been collected at least once before. Although there are a few humorous pieces (Mark Twain, S.J. Perelman, James Thurber), this is a sober and reflective collection, each essay the product of long thought.

The book would be a rich and valuable reading experience at any time, but is especially comforting during these somber, grieving days. This is paradoxical, since the best pieces are those that lay bare the country's worst injustice - racial prejudice. I expected to have trouble reading these painful essays, not wanting to feel angry or ashamed about my country right now, but it wasn't so. The unparalleled eloquence, the intimacy of these articulate voices, stand in such stark contrast to the vicious ignorance they've endured, that they hearten the reader by proving the strength and durability of the human heart.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful overview of America in the 20th century., September 17, 2000

By 

William S. Shapiro (Brighton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Essays of the Century (Hardcover)

Unlike the collection of short stories published last year, the editors did not have to limit themselves to essays printed in specific publications, leaving them able to pick the cream of the crop. But they aren't just well written pieces of non-fiction from some of the greatest writers like Tom Wolfe, Lewis Thomas, or Cynthia Ozick. Arranged in chronological order, they give a great sense of where we were as a country and how we've developed in the past hundred years. The only flaw is that many of the pieces, such as Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and Maya Angelou's excerpt from "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" will be familiar to most readers, but it's worth it to have these essays bound in one collection.