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The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present
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About The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays
Product Description "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." --Rivka GalchenA monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. 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. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. 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 New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. 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. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay. Review “An endlessly fortifying mixture of famous works and neglected gems that can take pride of place on anyone's bedside table for months before its pleasures come close to being exhausted.” — The Wall Street Journal“A treasure trove, a word hoard, a bonanza, perfect for dipping into and rifling through. . . . Lopate has amassed a heap of marvels. . . . A superb guide to the nation’s most adventurous and searching forays into prose.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Eight hundred pages of mostly delight and edification. . . . Give in to its choral quality and it's easy to feel not just the sweep of our centuries but the dialogical nature of our grandest ideas and most persistent struggles.” — The New York Times “An almost embarrassing abundance of riches. . . . Readers of Lopate’s seminal 1994 anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay” will already be familiar with his skill at picking pieces that perfectly offset and interrogate each other. Diving into one of his collections is always a delightful experience.” — C hristian Science Monitor“A feast of American thought, wit, and wisdom.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Phillip Lopate has captured the history of a nation speaking to itself and to the world. Lopate's rich and expansive understanding of the form has allowed him to uncover the essayistic voice in unexpected places—the sermon, the eulogy, the political treatise. To read The Glorious American Essay is to envision the American experiment itself as a kind of essay, a narrative characterized by trial and error, triumphs and false starts. One comes away from this volume with a renewed sense of the essay's vitality and its ability to capture the diverse and evolving consciousness of a country.” — Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of Interior States “In this essential and, I daresay, definitive compendium, Phillip Lopate not only revisits the classics, he offers essays you might not have realized were essays: political speeches, historical documents, the musings of writers who probably had little idea at the time that they were creating lasting art. In doing so, Lopate captures what’s most magical about this form; it’s all around us at eye level—wherever there are words you can probably find an essay—yet the right hands can take it to places you never imagined.” — Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth: Essays “The essay form models the way we need to live now. We need to think and feel in so many directions, reject easy dogmas, test our beliefs and desires. . . . Once
