Customer Reviews

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

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It's clear that reading good literature leads to improved writing. This anthology is a superb collection, selected and introduced by Phillip Lopate. Lopate is said to be one of the best essayists and critics of the personal essay. The book identifies itself as a "Teachers & Writers Collaborative Book". It is absolutely wonderful, a thick, heavy book full of pleasure and is dubbed as the "first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre."

In his introduction, Lopate says of the personal essay: The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue, a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.

The introduction is with rich detail of everything you ever needed to know about the "personal essay". He delves into his selection, rationale and arrangement of this book. As I said, everything you ever needed to know is here!

The collection consists of 75 personal essays, spanning over 400 years. The first section is called the forerunners, these are the earliest dating from 1600's, including: Seneca, Plutarch, Kenko, Shonagon, Hsiu, Michel De Montaigne. Then, the rise of the English essay: Abraham Cowley, Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, etc.

Another section is titled "Other Cultures, Other Continents", some listed are: Ivan Turgenev, Lu Hsun, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, etc. Last section is titled "American Scene" includes: Thoreau, Thurber, McCarthy, Fitzgerald, E.B. White, Baldwin, Didion, Lopate, etc., etc.

Then, he has all essays in a table of contents categorized by "Theme and Form". Some types of theme are are: ambition, city life, country living, death, drugs & alcohol, disability & illness, food, family ties, leisure, love and sexuality, music, nature, walking, race & ethnicity etc. etc.

The classifications of essays under "Form" list: analytical meditation, consolation, diatribe, humor, list, mossaic, memoir, etc., etc. Many of the essays may be cross-referenced into a few different classifications.

If you consider writing essay, this is a great tool and a real keeper. ..Rizzo

Laurie Stone, the essayist and creative writing teacher, recommended this book to me as the most essential volume on the personal essay. I could not agree more. The editor, Philip Lopate, is one of the most well-respected authors of the personal essay and he has compiled this anthology of pieces from the classical era to the present. The book works well for readers and writers alike. Lopate, in his lengthy introduction, gives an overview of the personal essay, and instructions on how to use this book as a learning tool. It is divided into several sections, beginning with the essay's forerunners in the classical period. Michel De Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, gets his own section. Personally, I did not find it useful to read the book cover-to-cover - I read it in reverse. I started out with the most recent, contemporary essays - those most accessible to me - and went backwards in order to see the devolution of the essay, as it were.

The essay is fast becoming one of my favorite forms - it is short, funny, and insightful. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE.

A book that has travelled with me for years and well worth all the space in my limited luggage space. I would definitely take this book to a desert island and it would be a book that I would grab off its shelf if my house was on fire.

Time has made me appreciate the voices contained within its cover greatly.

There are a lot of really poor essay anthologies on the market. This is not one of them. Lopate himself is an accomplished writer, but he does his readers the great favor of including a broad range of authors, temporally and experientially. Many anthologies skip the masters (Montaigne, Orwell, Johnson) in favor of more modern--and less talented--authors. If you are looking for a single anthology of essays this is the one. It covers the entire genre like no other. And it is comparitively cheap too.

The book opens with a terrific overview of the personal essay. Not only does it discuss the place of creative nonfiction in the writing spectrum but it gets to the heart of the personal essay -how we express the human experience. Lopate walks us, the average reader, through the choosing and the parceling of these kinds of works and by the end we are prepared for the well laid journey ahead.

The voices are so varied - from George Orwell's beautifully written essay on life in a British boarding school to James Baldwin's piece on his father's death and life as a Black man in America. We feel with each author, cry with them and share in their triumphs. Though the styles are quite different from one author to the next, the common thread is each person's love of writing, their adept manipulation of language, and the most important element of the essay - their honesty in each line.

This is an excellent choice for those are learning the art of creative nonfiction or for those more seasoned readers or writers who truly want a satisfying read.

One of my favorite books - it has a eclectic, rich, and well-thought collection of the greatest essays from the classical to the modern era. Entertaining and meditative at the same time.

My favorite essay in this thick, heavy, door-stopping book is a humble writing of G.K. Chesterton entitled "A Piece of Chalk". I absolutely adore drawing with chalk and so of course I felt connected to him right off the bat. It was actually the first time I'd ever read Chesterton before, and I instantly fell in love. There is something in his writing that resonates with something inside me... in other words, it feels good. This anthology also includes other masters, both classic and modern such as Didion, Seneca, among many, many others. Despite the size, it's very easy to read through and find your own favorites thanks to the table that sorts the essays by theme.

I recently attended a lecture by Philip Lopate. It was informative, instructional, and entertaining. I can say the same about this anthology. Anyone interested in the personal essay--readers, and especially writers--will find this collection a gold mine. I highly recommend it.

EXTREMELY big book for the class I was in. This was a complementary book along with another one for a writing 212 class in Brigham Young University. It's about 800 pages, like I said, it's a big book. It's extensive, sometimes wordy, yet if used only for sections its perfect. It's very insightful. Very interesting. Highly recommend it.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present is a teachers and writers collaborative book expounding the personal essay. Lopate believes intimacy is the hallmark of the personal essay, with "the writer seemingly speaking directly into the reader's ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom." This intimacy invites the reader into a relationship of shared thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsy. This relationship is based on a belief that at our core we have a common experience of what it means to be human; a common anxiety, a common drive for understanding and companionship. This definition gives me fresh cause to study personal essay as a form for story and to try my hand at it. I believe our commonness is what draws us into relationship with one another, our understanding of the divine, and our own souls. Personal essay can be the vehicle to help us tell all, argue all, and laugh along the way. I like this. I like this very much. Lopate gives each an invitation to write our own personal essay.