The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Essays

by Ian Hamilton (Editor)

This collection of the best essays written in the English language during the past one hundred years includes many that have become landmarks defining their Norman Mailer's "The White Negro", Tom Wolfe's "These Radical Chic Evenings", James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son", and Gore Vidal's "The Holy Family". Others are in a lighter vein, like James Thurber's lampoon of Salvador Dali's Secret Life or Max Beerbohm's reflections on "Laughter". There are Philip Roth on baseball and A. P. Herbert on bathrooms; Mary McCarthy's "My Confession", on her Communist sympathies; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-up". Each reader will have his or her own Eudora Welty capturing the precise moment at which she grew up, or Arthur Koestler debunking the effects of magic mushrooms. And each essay has stood the test of time, like Hannah Arendt's "The Concentration Camps", Edmund Wilson's now classic "The Wound and the Bow", and Paul Fussell on World War II.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

555 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.

Reviews

[Book busy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly spectacular spectrum of essays. Whilst not every one kept me equally gripped I feel like I've walked away from this with a much greater sense of the 20th century sensibility, alongside a list of fabulous essayists and authors to research further.

My favourite essays of the collection were as follows :

-T.S.Eliot 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'
-Max Beerbohm 'Laughter'
-D.H. Lawrence 'Why the Novel Matters'
-George Orwell 'England Your England'
-W.H. Auden 'The Guilty Vicarage'
-F.R Leavis 'Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture'
-Eudora Welty 'The Little Store'
-Randall Jarrell 'The Obscurity of the Poet'
-James Baldwin 'Notes of a Native Son'
-Arthur Koestler 'Return Trip to Nirvana'
-Tom Wolfe 'These Radical Chic Evenings'
-Philip Larkin- 'The Pleasure Principle'
-Joan Didion- 'Goodbye to All That'
-John Updike- 'The Bankrupt Man'

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth it for John Carey’s ‘Down with Dons’ alone.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Woman," by G.K. Chesterton (1906): 8.25
- Here we have it: the Urtext of a certain type of contemporary intellectual conservative (and note, this is far different from what Chesterton was in his own time--it's simply that he's become an eminently imitable model for today's bowtie wearers). It's seductive to get caught up in the quips and the humor and the (supposed) good natured gendered ribbing and the wry (supposed) logic of the takedown of progressive ideas (his, 'yes, communal living is cheaper, but so is sharing trousers' and wash his hands of the whole matter), and miss the fact that he's arguing from a clearly privileged (don't the poor all have their own rooms anyway?) and aggrieved perspective. It IS easy to miss that, that is, unless we happen to have the benefit of 100 years of retrospection, in which case the baser elements of conservative arguments are more transparently laid bare, ie. he's arguing against a type of social welfare we now see as helpful and generous and in the better interests of society as a whole, whereas his contemporaries didn't have that luxury--much as dealing with conservative derision regarding single payer of free college have now. Sample conservative firebomb email sign off: 'The question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is increasing; the question is whether we are increasing it.'