The Glorious American Essay

June 1, 2020

The multithreat Lopate, a novelist, poet, and critic also known as an editor and anthologist of the personal essay, here collects three centuries worth of American essays, with authors ranging from Cotton Mather to Rachel Carson to Zadie Smith.

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September 15, 2020
Four centuries of essays testify to the richness of the form. In the first of a projected three volumes of collected essays, Lopate offers what he justifiably calls "a smorgasbord of treats, a place to begin to sample the endless riches of the American essay": 100 essays from the 18th to the 21st centuries, from Cotton Mather to Zadie Smith. Volume 2, The Golden Age of the American Essay, will focus on the years 1945-2000, and Volume 3 will be dedicated to pieces from the 21st century. Many writers included here are likely to be familiar to readers but perhaps not to the students for whom this collection seems aimed, with its informative introduction, succinct headnotes, and contents organized by both theme and form. George Washington is represented by his Farewell Address; Emerson, by "Experience"; Margaret Fuller, by an excerpt from Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Thoreau rings in, predictably, with "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"; Henry James, with "The Art of Fiction"; Jane Addams, with a piece on settlement houses; William James, with "What Makes a Life Significant?" Some essays--such as Dorothy Parker's musings on people notable for their goodness and James Thurber's on men's idealizing of women--seem dusty, if not dated, although Fanny Fern's dryly satirical "Delightful Men," from 1870, has lost none of its bite. Essays that consider race, ethnicity, disability, social justice, and sexual orientation make the collection timely. In "The Homosexual Villain," written for a gay magazine in 1955, Norman Mailer candidly reveals the experiences and readings that transformed his bias against gay men. "My God, homosexuals are people too," he realized suddenly. Among the many other notable contributors are Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, M.F.K. Fisher, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and Jamaica Kincaid.. A thoughtfully edited volume that reflects America's changing social, political, and cultural life.

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November 1, 2020
Lopate, writer and professor, staked his ground a quarter-of-century ago as an ardent and expert advocate for the essay in the cherished global anthology The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. In this dynamically curated collection, he celebrates the versatility and significance of the "glorious American essay." A chronological table of contents is followed by a thematic list organizing the 100 spectacularly varied and powerful works into such categories as "Feminism and Gender" (Margaret Fuller, Audre Lorde), "Race and Ethnicity" (Ralph Ellison, Richard Rodriguez), and "Landscape and Sense of Place" (Mary Austin, Annie Dillard), as well as a list by form (biographical, critical, humorous, memoir). Expected writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin) are matched by those who will be new to readers, including the clarion and pioneering women essayists Judith Sargent Murray and Sui Sin Far. With reflection, dissent, wit, poignancy, and finesse at every turn, this vibrant and illuminating pairing of social and literary histories is a vital resource. In two forthcoming volumes, Lopate will deepen coverage of the postwar era and the twenty-first century.

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