- p. 589-90, The Best American Essays of the Century.
Sunday, July 25, 2021
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F(rancis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald
- p. 575, The Best American Essays of the Century.
W.E.B. Du Bois
W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois
- p. 573, The Best American Essays of the Century.
Monday, June 21, 2021
Henry Adams
The great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, the prominent Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918) did not follow their illustrious paths to the U.S. presidency. Instead, he devoted himself to writing, producing several multivolume histories of the nation, an enormous quantity of political journalism, and two novels. He is best known today for two nonfiction works (both privately printed) that grew out of his scientific theory of history, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907), a third-person autobiography that imagines Americans in the year 2000 while pursuing one of the earliest investigations into ideas of chaos and complexity. Having moved to Washington in 1877 with his wife (who committed suicide in 1885, an incident not mentioned in the autobiography), Adams quickly became an "insider," forming acquaintances with practically every president until his death at age eighty. See Henry Adams: Novels, Mont-Saint-Michel, The Education (ed. Ernest and Jayne N. Samuels, 1983).
- p. 569, The Best American Essays of the Century.
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Edward Hoagland
- p. 578, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1999.
Stephen Jay Gould
- p. 576-7, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2002.
Louis Menand
Louis Menand is the author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies and is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2004.
Susan Orlean
SUSAN ORLEAN, guest editor, is the author of My Kind of Place, The Orchid Thief, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1982, she has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2005.
David Foster Wallace
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, guest editor, is the author of several highly acclaimed books, including the novel Infinite Jest and the essay collection Consider the Lobster. He has been the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and numerous other awards.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2007.
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Friday, February 12, 2021
Tom Wolfe
- p. 589-90, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 318). Ticknor & Fields.
Geoffrey C. Ward
GEOFFREY C. WARD, guest editor,
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1996.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 318). Ticknor & Fields.
Calvin Trillin
CALVIN TRILLIN wrote a column for The Nation from 1978 to 1985 and is currently a syndicated columnist. He is the author of many books, including U.S. Journal, American Fried, Runestruck, Floater, Uncivil Liberties, Killings, With All Disrespect, and If You Can't Say Something Nice. He has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 1963, where "Rumors Around Town" appeared as part of his "U.S. Journal" series. Mr. Trillin lives in New York with his wife and their two daughters.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 318). Ticknor & Fields.
Robert Stone
ROBERT STONE is the author of A Hall of Mirror, which won the Faulkner Award in 1967; Dog Soldiers, which received the National Book Award in 1975; A Flag for Sunrise in 1981; and Children of Light in 1986. His articles and short stories have appeared in many publications, and he has received the John Dos Passos Prize for literature and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. he taught creative writing for many years at Amherst College and recently at the University of California at San Diego.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 318). Ticknor & Fields.
Scott Russell Sanders
SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS teaches literature and intellectual history at Indiana University. He is the author of ten books, including The Paradise of Bombs, which appeared earlier this year and won the Associated Writing Programs Award for creative nonfiction. Two of his novels, The Invisible Company and The Engineer of Beasts, will appear in 1988. Quarriers" and "Stone Towns and the Country Between," both of which were listed among "Notable Essays of 1985," have been collected in Stone Country, a book about southern Indiana's limestone region.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317-8). Ticknor & Fields.
Phyllis Rose
PHYLLIS ROSE is the author of two biographical works, Woman of Letter: A Life of Virginia Woolf and Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. She has written about literature and life for The Atlantic, Vogue, the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times Book Review, and The Nation, and did the "Hers" column for the New York Times for ten weeks. Some of her reviews and literary essays appeared in her collection, Writing of Women. A professor of English at Wesleyan University, she is currently working on a book about Josephine Baker, the black American dancer who went to Paris in 1925 and never came back.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.
Gregor Von Rezzori
GREGOR VON REZZORI is an Austro-Italian born in Rumania. Of his novels written in German, two have been published in English translations, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Death of My Brother Abel. In 1958 he translated Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita into German. Rezzori, who wrote his report on Lolitaland in English, lives in Tuscany and New York.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.
Samuel Pickering, JR.
SAMUEL PICKERING, JR., teaches English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of critical books on evangelical religion and the novel and on John Locke and eighteenth-century children's books. Two books of his familiar essays have been published, A Continuing Education and The Right Distance, recently published by the University of Georgia Press. He is now completing another collection of essays called May Days.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.
William Pfaff
WILLIAM PFAFF writes political essays for The New Yorker and a column for the International Herald Tribune and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Until 1978, he was deputy director of the European affiliate of Hudson Institute. Earlier, he had been a political warfare officer, a soldier, and an editor, as well as the author or co-author of four books on contemporary history and politics.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.
Elting E. Morison
ELTING E. MORISON is Killian Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Men, Machines, and Modern Times and From Know-How to Nowhere and editor of the eight-volume Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. He is at present a contributor to American Heritage.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.
Barry Lopez
BARRY LOPEZ (1945-2020) published the novel Horizon in 2019. The New York Times Book Review called it "...beautiful and brutal—a story of the universal human condition." A celebrated writer of fiction and nonfiction, Lopez was awarded the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams and the John Burrows Medal for Of Wolves and Men; he received a Guggenheim fellowship among other honors. In 2020, Lopez was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the Sun Valley Writers' Conference's first Writer in the World Prize. Throughout his writing life, Lopez collaborated with dozens of international writers and artists and fostered the careers of many younger men and women. For fifty years, Lopez lived next to his beloved McKenzie River in Oregon yet also traveled to more than eighty countries, where he enjoyed rich friendships. He died in December 2020, surrounded by his family.
- The Best American Essays 2021 (p. 203). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
BARRY LOPEZ has published several collections of short stories and is the author of Arctic Dreams, which won an American Book Award in 1986, and Of Wolves and Men, which won the John Burroughs Medal in 1979. A contributing editor to Harper's and North American Review, he has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His new book, Crossing Open Ground, will be published next year.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316-7). Ticknor & Fields.
Phillip Lopate
PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of two novels, The Rug Merchant and Confessions of Summer, two poetry books, The Daily Round and The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open, a collection of personal essays, Bachelorhood, and a nonfiction book, Being with Children. He is currently writing a new volume of essays, tentatively titled Against Joie de Vivre. He teaches one semester at the University of Houston and lives the rest of the year in New York City.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.
Donald Hall
- p. 577, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.
Gary Giddins
GARY GIDDINS, a staff writer for The Village Voice, is the author of three books on music, Riding on a Blue Note, Rhythm-a-ning, and Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, which won an American Book Award and has been adapted by Giddins as a documentary film. In 1985 he founded the American Jazz Orchestra, an eighteen-piece repertory ensemble that resides at Cooper Union. He is at work on a two-volume history of recorded jazz, an illustrated study of Louis Armstrong, and a collection of essays on musical and literary subjects.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.
Daniel Mark Epstein
DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spirits, two plays, textbooks, and a collection of memoirs and essays, Stars of Wonder, in which "The Case of Harry Houdini" appears. In 1977 he received the Prix de Rome in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1983 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is writer-in-residence at Towson State University in Baltimore.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.
Gretel Ehrlich
- p. 574, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 315). Ticknor & Fields.
John Gregory Dunne
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE is the author of Delano; Vegas; True Confessions; Quintana and Friends; Dutch Shea, Jr.; and The Red, White and Blue. With his wife, Joan Didion, he has co-authored several screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park, A Star Is Born, and True Confessions. He has contributed articles and essays to many magazines.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 315). Ticknor & Fields.
Richard Ben Cramer
RICHARD BEN CRAMER has been a magazine writer for several years and was formerly Middle East correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Esquire and Rolling Stone, and he has written on a variety of public figures. He is currently writing a book on the 1988 presidential campaigns. He lives in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 315). Ticknor & Fields.
Thursday, February 11, 2021
John Wain
JOHN WAIN has published many volumes of fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. His novels include Hurry on Down, A Winter in the Hills, and Young Shoulders. He is the editor of Everyman's Book of English Verse and the author of a prizewinning biography, Samuel Johnson. The first installment of his autobiography was Sprightly Running; his new book, Dear Shadows, will be published this year.
- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986.
Gore Vidal
GORE VIDAL was born in West Point and is the author of twenty novels, including the American chronicle (Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., and Lincoln), five plays, and five collections of essays, the most recent of which, The Second American Revolution, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1982. He is currently at work on a novel, Manifest Destiny.
- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986.
Frederick Turner
FREDERICK TURNER is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours. He is at work on a book about the making of the American literary landscape. A reformed professor, he is now a free-lance writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986.
Edward Rothstein
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN is the music critic for The New Republic and a senior editor at the Free Press, Macmillan Inc. He was a music critic for The New York Times and did graduate work in mathematics, literature, and philosophy at Brandeis and Columbia universities, and at the Committee on Social Though at the University of Chicago. His essays on literature, science, and culture have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The American Scholar, Musical Quarterly, the Washington Post, and other publications. He is at work on a study of the friendship between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin.
- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986.
Cynthia Ozick
"An essay," claims Cynthia Ozick, "is a thing of the imagination...A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is movement of a free mind at play." Essays, like the award-winning short stories and novels, she is known for, are imaginative and aesthetic experiments — in other words, literature — not position papers. Born (1928) in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, Ozick grew up in the atmosphere of a family-operated drugstore. After receiving her B.A. at New York University in 1949 and a year later an M.A. at Ohio State, Ozick called it quits with academic life and set out to take lessons from her master, Henry James, in the demanding art of fiction. Her first novel, Trust, appeared in 1966 and was followed by several volumes of short fiction and three more novels, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), and The Puttermesser Papers (1997). Her personal and literary essays appear in four collections: Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), Fame & Folly (1986), and Quarrel & Quandary (2000). She is also the author of two essay collections on writing, What Henry James Knew (1993) and Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character (1996). Ozick was guest editor of The Best American Essay of 1998.
- p. 584, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1998.
CYNTHIA OZICK is the author of two novels, Trust and The Cannibal Galazy, and several collections: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, Bloodshed and Three Novellas, and Levitation: Five Fictions. She has published Art & Ardor Essays and is currently at work on a novel.
- p. 284-5, The Best American Essays 1986.
George F. Kennan
GEORGE F. KENNAN, formerly a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia, is now a retired professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of a number of books on American foreign policy and diplomatic history, including The Nuclear Delusion, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order, and The Fateful Alliance.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
Anne Hollander
ANNE HOLLANDER is an independent scholar and writer living in New York City. Her book Seeing Through Clothes is about the representation of clothing in art. Her essays and review have appeared in The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Connoisseur, and Raritan. She is currently writing a book about painterly and graphic sources for film.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
Stephen Jay Gould
STEPHEN JAY GOULD teaches biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard University. He is the author of Ontogeny and Phylogeny, The Mismeasure of Man, and four collections of essays: Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horses' Toes, and The Flamingo's Smile. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he writes a monthly scientific essay for Natural History magazine.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
William H. Gass
Born (1924) in Fargo, North Dakota, William H(oward) Gass grew up in Warren, Ohio, and graduated from Kenyon College in 1947, after serving two years as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell in1954, specializing in the theory of metaphor, and then taught philosophy at Purdue from 1954 to 1969, when he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where in 1979 he became David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. Interested primarily in language and aesthetics, Gass began writing difficult fiction; he said of his first book, the novel Omensetter's Luck (1966), that he wrote it "to not have readers, while still deserving them." His essays make similar demands on readers and have been collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), The World Within the World (1978), and the National Book Critics Circle Award winners Habitations of the Word (1985) and Finding a Form (1996). The influence of Gertrude Stein (and her notion of "pure composition") can be seen in his philosophical meditation On Being Blue (1976). Gass has also published several volumes of fiction, including the well-known In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) and a long-awaited novel, The Tunnel (1995).
WILLIAM H. GASS is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, On Being Blue, and The World Within the Word. He is the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His recent collection of essays, Habitations of the Word, won the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
- p. 576, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
Robert Fitzgerald
ROBERT FITZGERALD, poet and translator of the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid, was Boylston Profesor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard. A collection of his selected prose, including essays on his friends James Agee, Randall Jarrell, and Flannery O'Connor will be published by New Directions in 1987. Robert Fitzgerald died in January 1985.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
Kai Erikson
KAI ERIKSON has written Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance and Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. He is editor of The Yale Review and professor of sociology and American studies at Yale University.
- p. 283-4, The Best American Essays 1986.
Gerald Early
- p. 573-4, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986.
Alexander Cockburn
ALEXANDER COCKBURN has been an Irish citizen resident of the United States since 1973. He writes regular columns for The Nation and The Wall Street Journal, and contributes to many magazines. He is currently writing books about the press and about automobiles.
- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986.
How to be an Obedient Asian in America
Use few words. Speak less, be unnoticeable. Know when to speak, and know what you're talking about when you speak. Forget what they told you about how you have to make mistakes to learn. Bullshit. That is for them, not you. Learn on your own, do not ask for help. Be useful in whatever you do. Yes, they will talk about you. How you are unsociable. But they also know for a fact, that you are useful.
Forget about equality. You aren't even fun enough to have beer with. It doesn't matter how well you do your job. You won't be part of them. You won't be part of them when they are laughing and joking during work, while you're the only one who's actually working at work. Be unnoticeable until they come to collect your products of your work. And they will reap the fruits of your work, while they're laughing and joking with a beer in their hands with your boss. They will tell you that you're doing great, that you're a Great American. Yeah, whatever, now you're probably like, fuck America.
Be sure to be frugal. Max out your 401k, and do the same for your IRA. In the end you will be a millionaire, and you won't have to see them again. But in retirement they won't even realize the bad financial decisions they've made, because those laughs and jokes got them higher than your hard work. They will keep on enjoying their beers and laughing an joking, and you will die a millionaire because you never unlearned being frugal.
In your deathbed you will wonder why all the troubles you endured being an obedient Asian in America, you will die yearning for the land you left to be free. You've made this land of the free more fertile, and your sons and daughters won't realize how free they are because the never experienced the opposite.
But rest in peace, be assured that your heirs will be real Americans. Their friends will joke and giggle how stereo-typically rich they are, from the money you never learned to waste. They won't even get offended at the Asian jokes and racial slurs because their origin is blurred. In America it doesn't matter what race you are, as long as you know how to laugh and giggle over a beer. If then you will be part of the team, no matter where the team headed.
Lionel Shriver
A prolific journalist with columns in The Spectator and Harper's Magazine, LIONEL SHRIVER has published one short story collection and fourteen novels, including the bestsellers The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047; Big Brother; So Much for That; The Post-Birthday World; and the Orange Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 feature film starring Tilda Swinton). Her latest novel is The Motion of the Body Through Space (2020). Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.
- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020.
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