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

From Publishers Weekly
"Here is a history of America told in many voices," declares Oates in her introduction, revealing the heart of her intelligent and incisive collection of 55 essays by American writers. Never attempting to capture or replicate a single, authentic "American identity," this collection succeeds by producing a comprehensive and multifaceted look at what America has been and, by extension, what it is and might become. While it's not explicitly political, the volume's multicultural intentions are visible. Beginning with "Cone-pone Opinions," a 1901 Mark Twain essay that uses the wisdom of an African-American child as its central image, Oates has fashioned a collection that calls attention to the way that "America" is made up of competing, and often antagonistic, cultural and social visions. There is not only the apparent contrast between the populist, overtly political visions of W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" and Mary McCarthy's "Artists in Uniform" and the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Oates has managed to find numerous pieces whose vision and philosophy resonate with one another without becoming homogeneous, so Gretel Ehrlich's meditation on pastoral aesthetics in "The Solace of Open Spaces" contrasts abruptly and ingeniously with Susan Sontag's urban-centered "Notes on Camp." In all, Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities. QPB and History Book Club selections; BOMC alternate. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
One of the pleasures of an anthology like this is reading people you might not otherwise have picked up. Like John Muir, whose "Stickeen," a life-and-death adventure on an Alaskan glacier with a singular small black dog, is a great piece of adventure writing. Or Jane Addams, whose insights into the spread of an urban legend of "The Devil Baby at Hull House" are thoughtful and compassionate. Another sort of pleasure comes from rereading familiar works in a new context: E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake," N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain," John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens," and Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse." Only seven of the essays come from the annual "Best American Essays" series that Atwan has coedited since 1986. The other 48 were culled from the rest of the century, with the ruling idea, Atwan says, "that the essays should speak to the present, not merely represent the past." Oates looked "for the expression of personal experience within the historical." They have created a mosaic of a century in an America whose dominant and recurring theme has been race. Essential for most libraries.DMary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
[Editor's note: The following is a combined review with THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS OF THE CENTURY, Vol. 2.]--Some essays are entertaining, some improving. Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up" is both. However often you've read this story/manifesto, there's more to hear. George Plimpton's mellow, intoxicating voice makes the third listening as pleasurable as the first. Katha Pollitt's reading of Mary McCarthy's "Artists in Uniform" also hits the ear exactly right. You'll be pleased to hear Joyce Carol Oates read her introduction twice, if you listen to both volumes. John Randolph Jones's reading of William Manchester's "Okinawa, the Bloodiest Battle of All" is as thrilling as it is informative. Other offerings, however, seem much more inclined to improve the listener than to seduce him. "Of the Coming of John" by W.E.B. Du Bois is doubtless a significant historical document, but we can hear the tragic ending a long way off. These 23 essays mix the superb with the simply good. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
As Oates observes in her rousing introduction to this powerful collection (a companion volume to the short story compendium edited by John Updike in 1999), the essay's great strength comes from its leap from the specific to the universal and from the magnetism and distinction of the writer's voice. The 55 essays showcased here do, as promised, exemplify the form. Virtuosic performances by writers passionate in their quest for understanding, and electrifying in their eloquence and perception, these are works of wit, discovery, anger, and praise. Oates took pains to select essays that contemplate diverse worlds, from nature to courtrooms, war and family memories. Race is a pervasive theme, explored with candor and insight by many, including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and, in a jolting 1912 condemnation of a Coatesville, Pennsylvania, lynching, John Jay Chapman. Complex and vital issues and states of mind are also crystallized by H. L. Mencken, Rachel Carson, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus Reviews
An eclectic anthology of 55 essays chosen by Oates (Blonde, p. 11, etc.) comprising a generous selection of less known but deserving work from mostly big-name writers.The collection is intended to be a greatest-hits volume of the 20th-century American essay and to stand as a companion to The Best American Essays franchise, which has been published annually since 1986. The essays included here cover the years from 1901 to 1997 and are arranged chronologically according to their original date of publication. In her introduction, Oates explains her ambitions as an editor: she tackled the project from the point of view of a literary conservator, trying to preserve worthy essays from the forgetfulness of history and vagaries of literary fashion. In order to make the task of selecting from a century's worth of writing manageable, Oates set out strict criteria: eliminating the work of writers who did not publish at least one volume of nonfiction during their career (thus ousting any one-hit-wonders), as well as those who wrote journalism or reportage. In this regard Oates self-consciously avoids creating a chronicle of the past century and, instead, collects an array of emotional journeys and obsessions. According to this formula, essays about of race and identity easily come to dominate: Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" stand out. A further eight essays also take race as their topic. Other major themes include science and nature, social change, artistic endeavor, and the struggle against nostalgia. Browsing the titles indicates that only a few touchstone essays are included, although most selections have been extracted from nonfiction books whose titles are better known. As a whole, the anthology does not deliver on the grandiose promise of its title. Instead, it delivers the "Best" essays not frequently anthologized. With so few surprises and most of the selections coming from the usual suspects, the overall effect is underwhelming. Above average, but definitely not the "Best." -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Bookseller Reviews

These essays educate us, amuse us, startle us with their immediacy. Who among us can read Henry Adam's "A Law of Acceleration," penned in 1904, and not think of our mind-zapping digital age? Who could resist the first sentence of Zora Neale Hurston's piece:I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief." And which of you could disagree with the unrepeatable wisdom of Gertrude Stein's "The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting."

The essays that Joyce Carol Oates has selected linger with us, not because their authors (from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King), retain their fame, but because each piece is a talisman, irreducible and well-carved. James Age's prose-poems "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" appeals to us today just as it inspired composer Samuel Barber decades ago, and two thirds of a century have only enhanced the thrall of the languorous rhythms of Edmund Wilson's "The Old Stone House." H.L. Mencken's article on the 1925 Scopes trial shames this week's pale convention prose with its freshness, and T.S. Eliot's 1919 "Tradition and The Individual Talent" still has something to teach us.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of-personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition." These works are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address.

This volume honors some of the twentieth century's best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about "The Lives of a Cell," Rachel Carson mulls "The Marginal World," and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown."

Taken together, 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."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

"Here is a history of America told in many voices," declares Oates in her introduction, revealing the heart of her intelligent and incisive collection of 55 essays by American writers. Never attempting to capture or replicate a single, authentic "American identity," this collection succeeds by producing a comprehensive and multifaceted look at what America has been and, by extension, what it is and might become. While it's not explicitly political, the volume's multicultural intentions are visible. Beginning with "Cone-pone Opinions," a 1901 Mark Twain essay that uses the wisdom of an African-American child as its central image, Oates has fashioned a collection that calls attention to the way that "America" is made up of competing, and often antagonistic, cultural and social visions. There is not only the apparent contrast between the populist, overtly political visions of W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" and Mary McCarthy's "Artists in Uniform" and the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Oates has managed to find numerous pieces whose vision and philosophy resonate with one another without becoming homogeneous, so Gretel Ehrlich's meditation on pastoral aesthetics in "The Solace of Open Spaces" contrasts abruptly and ingeniously with Susan Sontag's urban-centered "Notes on Camp." In all, Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities. QPB and History Book Club selections; BOMC alternate. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

". . . Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities."

KLIATT

In her excellent introduction to this collection, Joyce Carol Oates states her belief that "art should not be comforting." It should, instead, "provoke, disturb,...and expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." The reader should therefore be prepared to have these 55 carefully selected essays do just that. Arranged chronologically, the essays span the century with an average of five essays per decade. From Mark Twain to Saul Bellow by way of William James, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein, the collection notes literary trends as well as social upheavals as recorded in essays of W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Chosen from authors who had published at least one book of nonfiction or essays, this collection attempts to present a "mobile mosaic" of 20th-century America. Category: Collections. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Houghton Mifflin, 624p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Brookline, MA

Library Journal

One of the pleasures of an anthology like this is reading people you might not otherwise have picked up. Like John Muir, whose "Stickeen," a life-and-death adventure on an Alaskan glacier with a singular small black dog, is a great piece of adventure writing. Or Jane Addams, whose insights into the spread of an urban legend of "The Devil Baby at Hull House" are thoughtful and compassionate. Another sort of pleasure comes from rereading familiar works in a new context: E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake," N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain," John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens," and Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse." Only seven of the essays come from the annual "Best American Essays" series that Atwan has coedited since 1986. The other 48 were culled from the rest of the century, with the ruling idea, Atwan says, "that the essays should speak to the present, not merely represent the past." Oates looked "for the expression of personal experience within the historical." They have created a mosaic of a century in an America whose dominant and recurring theme has been race. Essential for most libraries.--Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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