The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.Ī one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.
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