Now in a more readable format, this sweeping collection ranges from the early 1600s through the 1980s and includes 140 essays by 120 of the finest writers in the history of the English language. John Gross, former book critic for The New York Times, has collected classics and rare gems, representative samples and personal favorites, intimate essays and learned, serious reflections and hysterically funny satire, by both British and American writers. The authors Gross has gathered form a gallery of genius, all indispensable masters of rhetoric, from Samuel Butler to Samuel Johnson, from George Eliot to George Bernard Shaw, from John Dryden to Ben Franklin, from E.B. White to Joan Didion. Including book reviews and travel sketches, history lessons and meditations, reflections on art and on potato chips, these essays sample four centuries of eloquence and insight in a collection that is at once immensely enlightening, edifying, and entertaining.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is a collection that succeeds in demonstrating the marvelous variety of the genre."--The Christian Science Monitor
"A distinguished miscellany."--The Chicago Tribune
"Most of the essays are very good indeed....A seductive anthology."--The Economist
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
John Gross is the author of 'The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters' (1973) and editor of 'The Oxford Book of Aphorisms' (1983), among other publications. He was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1974 to 1981, and is currently theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fine selection of great pieces.,
By
This review is from: The Oxford Book of Essays (Paperback)
Gross was faced with a tough task when asked to edit this volume: how to cram the history of a form that is so flexible, and so widely used, into a compact volume? Essays have been selected from the seventeenth century on, and Gross has included writers from the USA as well as Britain. Almost his only concession has been the exclusion of any writer born after WW2. Plagued by so much choice, he has done a great job. Of course, there are omissions. Several writers from 'The New Yorker' have their say, but there was no room for its two best essayists, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. And the abscence of Kenneth Tynan is lamentable: his essay on the folly of the Lord Chamberlin, the Censor of Pays in Britain, is far better than that of Joseph Conrad, a brilliant novelist but an undistiunguished essayist, which is included here. But everyone will find a few favourites missing in any book of this kind. In fact, Gross has sometimes tried to be too representative, to include too many discrete essays, with the result that he seems to have plumped for very short pieces. Perhaps half a dozen writers seem to have been included simply because they are or were great writers, and not because they wrote great essays. Others are represented by inferior pieces, largely for reasons of space -- space often taken up by lesser writers. E.B. White, for instance, gets just over two pages for a pretty run-of-the-mill essay, where he would be better served by 'Death of a Pig' or 'Farewell, my lovely!', both of which are far better than, say, anything by Joseph Epstein. And John Updike's 'The Bankrupt Man' hardly gives an idea of what he's capable of. But these are minor quibbles. Anyone who enjoys reading essays will find countless hours of enjoyment in this book: essays by Samuel Johnson, Walter Bagehot, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, John Jay Chapman, and many others, are classics that repay many re-readings.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fine selection of great pieces.,
By
This review is from: The Oxford Book of Essays (Paperback)
Gross was faced with a tough task when asked to edit this volume: how to cram the history of a form that is so flexible, and so widely used, into a compact volume? Essays have been selected from the seventeenth century on, and Gross has included writers from the USA as well as Britain. Almost his only concession has been the exclusion of any writer born after WW2. Plagued by so much choice, he has done a great job. Of course, there are omissions. Several writers from 'The New Yorker' have their say, but there was no room for its two best essayists, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. And the abscence of Kenneth Tynan is lamentable: his essay on the folly of the Lord Chamberlin, the Censor of Plays in Britain, is far better than that of Joseph Conrad, a brilliant novelist but an undistiunguished essayist, which is included here. But everyone will find a few favourites missing in any book of this kind. In fact, Gross has sometimes tried to be too representative, to include too many discrete essays, with the result that he seems to have plumped for very short pieces. Perhaps half a dozen writers seem to have been included simply because they are or were great writers, and not because they wrote great essays. Others are represented by inferior pieces, largely for reasons of space -- space often taken up by lesser writers. E.B. White, for instance, gets just over two pages for a pretty run-of-the-mill essay, where he would be better served by 'Death of a Pig' or 'Farewell, my lovely!', both of which are far better than, say, anything by Joseph Epstein. And John Updike's 'The Bankrupt Man' hardly gives an idea of what he's capable of. But these are minor quibbles. Anyone who enjoys reading essays will find countless hours of enjoyment in this book: essays by Samuel Johnson, Walter Bagehot, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, John Jay Chapman, and many others, are classics that repay many re-readings.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for general reading,
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This review is from: The Oxford Book of Essays (Hardcover)
A very idiosyncratic collection of little-known essays by some major writers and some unknowns. Almost all of them are by 19C English writers; very few are interesting in and of themselves. No introduction, no writer bios, no notes of any kind.
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