The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series)
List Price:
Our Price: $10.00
You Save: $9.95 (50%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.98 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Adapter: Robert AtwanEditor: Joyce Carol Oates
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2001-10-10
ISBN: 0618155872
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Book Reviews of The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series)
Book Review: chocolate box of 20th-century thinking
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series)
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
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.
General Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Novels, Essays, and Other Literary Works for Teaching U.S. History
Our Nation's Archive: The History of the United States in DocumentsBlack Dog & Leventhal Publishers; Published: 1999-05-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.20
Price in other shops:
Great American Speeches: the Stories and transcripts of the words that changed our historyQuercus Books; Published: 2006-08-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.68
Price in other shops:
Speeches That Changed the World: The Stories and Transcripts of the Moments That Made Historyby Smith Davies Publishing
Book Sales; Published: 2006-09-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.87
Price in other shops:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Editionby James W. Loewen
New Press; Published: 2008-04-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $16.82
Price in other shops:
The Killer Angelsby Michael Shaara
Ballantine Books; Published: 2001-05-29; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.00
Price in other shops:
The Big Skyby A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Mariner Books; Published: 2002-01-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.75
Price in other shops:
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed Americaby Erik Larson
Vintage; Published: 2004-02-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.85
Price in other shops:
On the Road (Penguin Classics)by Jack Kerouac
Penguin Classics; Published: 2002-12-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.50
Price in other shops:
The Things They Carriedby Tim O'Brien
Penguin; Published: 1990; Paperback; Book
Best price: $24.20
Taking Sides: American History, Volume II (Taking Sides)by Larry Madaras, James M SoRelle
McGraw-Hill/Dushkin; Published: 2004-11-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.20
Similar Books and other products
The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford Books of Prose)Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2002-05-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.27
Price in other shops:
The Best American Short Stories 2007 (The Best American Series (TM))Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2007-10-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.99
Price in other shops:
The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series)Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2004-10-14; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.91
Price in other shops:
The Norton Book of Personal EssaysW. W. Norton & Company; Published: 1997-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.95
Price in other shops:
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (On Writing Well)by William K. Zinsser
Collins; Published: 2006-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $18.93
The Best American Essays 2006 (The Best American Series (TM))Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2006-10-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.55
Price in other shops:
The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2005-10-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.45
Price in other shops:
The Best American Essays 2007 (The Best American Series (TM))Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2007-10-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.49
Price in other shops:
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Presentby Phillip Lopate
Anchor; Published: 1995-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.15
Price in other shops:
The Best American Short Stories of the Century (The Best American Series (TM))Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2000-04-20; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.80
Price in other shops: