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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.508
EAN num: 9780618155873
ISBN number: 0618155872
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 624
Printing Date: October 10, 2001
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin
Sale Popularity Level: 26402
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Product Description:
This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.
From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, 'into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going.'
Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir,
T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.
Amazon.com Review:
The title The Best American Essays of the Century seems transparent enough, but don't be deceived. What Joyce Carol Oates has assembled is not so much a diverse collection as a sonorous march through what keeps getting called the American century. Read this not as a collection to dip into but as a history--a history of race in America. Oates says it best herself in her introduction: 'It can't be an accident that essays in this volume by men and women of ethnic minority backgrounds are outstanding; to paraphrase Melville, to write a 'mighty' work of prose you must have a 'mighty' theme.' The mighty pens at work here belong to, among others, Zora Neale Hurston ('How It Feels to Be Colored Me'), Langston Hughes ('Bop'), and James Baldwin ('Notes of a Native Son'). Oates has opted not for the most unexpected but for the most important and stirring essays of our time.
Other chords sound repeatedly as well: the problem of our relationship with nature (Annie Dillard, John Muir, and Gretel Ehrlich); the difficulty of identity in disrupted times (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, and Michael Herr). In her essay 'The White Album,' Didion famously declares: 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' The stories Oates has collected are not easy. Here is the hard-won truth, from writers unwilling to forgive even themselves. Even Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't let himself off the hook, as he writes in his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail': 'If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.' --Claire Dederer
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a fantastic sampling of American memoir and reflections on race, gender, nature, literature, and other topics of broad interest. It features the century's greatest, starting with Twain, ending with Bellow. The volume is beautifully introduced by Atwan and Oates, both of whom help chip away at the manifold mystery of what makes a good essay. If memoir is of particular interest to you, you will appreciate the poetic sensibilities of the writers. The position essays are equally lucid. I will be teaching a course shortly on developing narrative style and feel fortunate to have stumbled upon this collection. For readers who are looking for varied and pleasant readings, the works in this book will provide that with a challenging edge.
Rated by buyers -
I loved this book because it illustrated to me how much our society has and hasn't changed over the years. The writing was exquisite which was a pleasant respite from today's 24/7 verbal and informational assaults which are produced so quickley and usually without much pondering or maturing of themes and ideas. I see the essay as a slowly dying art form and I am just an average American who loves to read and think and write, I'm definitely not an academic predicting the end of civilization because of the pace of life and thinking brought about by technology.
Rated by buyers -
Joyce Carol Oates is not simply a prolific writer, she is also a tremendously 'prolific' reader. In this selection of the best American essays of the century, she and her co- editor series editor Robert Atwan choose many of the most important American essays of the century. If I just think of those I know beforehand there is William James famous ' The Moral Equivalent of War' which talks about the place of sport in American life. There is perhaps the most well- known literary essay of the century T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in which he argues that each new literary work of significance redefines the whole Tradition, makes us see it all in a new way. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald's tremendously moving personal essay on his own breakdown,'The Crack-up' in which he tells us ' in the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning. There is James Baldwin's searing essay, 'Notes of a Native Son' and Mark Twain telling us in 'Corn-pone' that where the person gets his core- pone is where his opinions is. It is a typical humorous and brilliant Twain attack on the common-sense conventional mind, and a call for the kind of independent thinking he in his work so exemplified.
There are a considerable number of essays on race, on the condition of the blacks in America. Richard Wright, Zola Hurston, Baldwin, Maya Angelou. There are outstanding essays on science by Lewis Thomas, Stephen J. Gould, Oliver Sachs. There are literary explorations and explorations of the American lanscape and mind.
Among the other writers included are Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Tom Wofe, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick ,William Manchester, John Updike, Saul Bellow, James Agee, John Jay Chapman, John Muir, Nabovkov, Edwin Hoagland, Willam Gass, Hemingway, Elizabeth Hardwick, S.J. Perelman, Gertrude Stein, Thurber, E.B. White , Oates herself and many others.
It may not contain all the best, and it may not all be good, but much of it is the best, and a good share very good indeed.
Rated by buyers 
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Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had 100 years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up with.
Rated by buyers -
I don't think I'm alone in viewing essays as members of a somewhat lower caste than novels and non-fiction books. Maybe it's because I associate the essay with newspapers, and people like George Will who pretend to know more than their readers. I think the editors of this essay collection understood that popular conception, and tried very hard to fight it. In line with that fight, one of the organizing themes of this book seems to be ``Essays About Individual Experiences." True, many of the essays take individual experiences and move into a more general realm, but they're always grounded in the author's experiences. Contrast this with George Will - Trinity College undergrad, Princeton grad school in political science - writing essays about poverty and policy. There's more legitimacy - in my mind, anyway - in Richard Wright writing an essay about ``The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."
Many of the essays in this book, like Wright's, are on the subject of race in America. We have Zora Neale Hurston's ``How It Feels To Be Colored Me" (``Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How *can* any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me."); Alice Walker's ``Looking For Zora," on her attempts to find Hurston's lonely, abandoned, unkempt gravestone in Florida; Maya Angelou's ``I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" (later part of a book of the same name); Martin Luther King's ``Letter From Birmingham Jail"; and so forth. As the editors suggest, race has been one of the longest-running struggles in the United States; it shouldn't surprise us that it has produced works of such power. The autobiographical format of these essays particularly fits with their subject matter. That format works a lot better than, say, a collection of statistics (however truthful those statistics might be).
_Best American Essays_ is far more than a book about race, however. It contains some hilarious essays, like S.J. Perelman's ``Insert Flap `A' and Throw Away" (on his attempts to put together toys for his kids); an essay on bullfighting (Hemingway's ``Pamplona in July"); essays about suicide (``The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, William H. Gass's ``The Doomed In Their Sinking", Edward Hoagland's ``Heaven and Nature"); Stephen Jay Gould on why humans seem to need to divide a complex continuum into a discrete beginning and end (``The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"); and on and on. All of them are almost crystalline in their density of information. All of them left me, after 10 or 12 pages, reeling as though I'd just set down a novel.
I'm particularly fond of William Manchester's essay memorializing the battle of Okinawa (``Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle Of All"). I normally enter essays about war with a large dose of skepticism and revulsion, and this one was no different. ``Great," I thought, ``Manchester was a vet, so this will be another essay about the glory of armed combat." It is nothing at all like that. To use a nice vogue term, it is a deconstruction of what war really is, and what war has become over the centuries. It turned from 15-minute battles around the time of Agincourt to 10-month-long subwars of attrition during World War I. But let's look at those minutes-long battles, says Manchester:
``The dead were bludgeoned or stabbed to death, and we
have a pretty good idea of how this was done. ... Kabar
fighting knives, with seven-inch blades honed to such
precision that you could shave with them, were issued to
Marines ... You drove the point of your blade into a
man's lower belly and ripped upward. In the process, you
yourself became soaked in the other man's gore. After that
charges at Camlann, Arthur must have been half drowned in
blood."
The essay reveals war's pointlessness and the revulsion that mankind must feel in its presence. Coming from someone who fought on Okinawa, it carries more weight than all the world's pundits could ever bestow. The entire volume holds this authority. Since its contributors are also some of the most talented authors that the U.S. has ever known, there's no reason not to buy this astonishing work.
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