The Best American Essays of the Century

by Joyce Carol Oates (Editor), Robert Atwan (Consultant Editor)

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.

Foreword / by Robert Atwan --
Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates --
Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain --
Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois --
Law of acceleration / Henry Adams --
Stickeen / John Muir --
Moral equivalent of war / William James --
Handicapped / Randolph Bourne --
Coatesville / John Jay Chapman --
Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams --
Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot --
Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway --
Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken --
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --
Old stone house / Edmund Wilson --
What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein --
Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber --
Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright --
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee --
Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost --
Once more to the lake / E.B. White --
Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman --
Bop / Langston Hughes --
Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter --
Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy --
Marginal world / Rachel Carson --
Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --
Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --
Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --
Hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall --
Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. --
Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe --
Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag --
Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov --
Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday --
Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick --
Illumination rounds / Michael Herr --
I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou --
Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas --
Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee --
Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass --
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --
Looking for Zora / Alice Walker --
Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich --
White album / Joan Didion --
Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez --
Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --
Total eclipse / Annie Dillard --
Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick --
Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester --
Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland --
Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould --
Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --
Disposable rocket / John Updike --
hey all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates --
Graven images / Saul Bellow --
Biographical notes --
Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Classics, History, Writing, Collections

624 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Richard Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did I think? What didn't I think? Every essay in this beautifully curated collection is a home run, and most of them were
from writers I didn't know. John Muir? Sure, Muir woods, all that. But how would I in my lifetime have learned that he is a
sublime writer, pure humor, pure soul, and that he had written the best thing I've ever read about a man's relationship with a dog?
("Stickeen"). "The Moral Equivalent of War", by William James, speaks of how to turn the militaristic vision and people's need for
it to something positive in the world without a drop of sentimentality about War Being Bad. And I could go on. But you should take my
place, and get this book. If any part of your life is available to be changed, to whatever degree, you will find something in this book that
will change it.

[Les]

I'll cop to only having read 15 or 16 of these essays. They're pretty damn good - as the title of the collection would imply. I stuck mostly to essays written by or that were about women, though I enjoyed Robert Frost's famous essay on poetic form (once I started to understand it a couple of paragraphs in) and appreciated John Updike's take on the penis and all the utilitarian maleness that it springs from (and is). What stuck most with me was reading Zora Hurston's essay on a form of self-acceptance and agony, then reading Alice Walker's moving essay on locating and honoring Zora's forgotten grave. Due to the choice of authors, there are several one-liners in each of the essays I read that blew me away. Cynthia Ozick took the prize with an essay that was sound, solid and not particularly moving, until the final paragraph which broke open my mind and heart and silenced me for several long moments. This made me want to read and write more essays and of course - read more by these authors and then re-read some of the essays.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of book you pick up every once in a while to read an essay here, an essay there. What I have read so far has been thrilling.

Mark Twain's "Corn-Pone Opinions" is a sardonic and hilarious look at what following sheep we humans are, and how impossible it is to form a unique opinion. The genius lies in his own inability to discern why this is; after all, Twain is human too, and he humbly confines himself to the masses.

John Muir's "Stickeen" will keep you on the edge of your seat-- has anyone ever described a storm so beautifully?-- and if you're a dog person, then you'll certainly be weeping by the end.

I can't say I've ever been a huge fan of Hemingway's dry, self-righteous style, but his "Pamplona in July" is certainly a unique look at a world I knew nothing about, in a country I yearn to visit.

Zora Neale Hurston's "How it Feels to Be Colored Me" is playful and joyous, William James's "The Moral Equivalent of War" is rather opaque but still interesting, and of course, Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail" is one of the greatest, most moving pieces of writing in existence. For these examples alone, the book is worth owning, but as I flip through the essays that still lie ahead-- Fitzgerald, E.B. White, Rachel Carson, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, and on and on-- I know this book will become more and more valuable each time I pick it up.

[Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The century” here being the 20th, if that was unclear.

I read one essay per night for two months, except for the last three, which I finished in one burst because I was ready to wrap it up. I don’t truly believe that these are the 55 “best” American essays of the years 1900 to 1999, nor do I really think they’re trying to be, but they are usually at least good, and represent a wide range of authors both familiar (to me) and less so. (Well, a wider range in some regards than others; about three fifths of the contributors are white men.)

The subject matter is also wide-ranging, though certain themes do recur: the places and people of childhood, the glories and perils of nature, the pitfalls of aging, prejudice in its various guises (but particularly its racist ones), the horrors of war. The variety of mediums in which the pieces originally appeared is likewise impressive, while still all fitting within the broad purview of the “essay” form: book chapters, magazine articles, newspaper columns, speeches, open letters. Maybe it’s just a reflection of the editors’ decision-making, but writers of certain eras seem to be more attuned to current events than those of others; the 1910s are dominated by strident reformers, while you’d never know from this that the ‘30s and ‘40s were defined by a Depression and a World War. For me the 1950s through the ‘70s represent the peak in quality, while the ‘80s and ‘90s mark a decline, perhaps not unrelated to the fact that this is the point at which the editors limit their selections to pieces that have already run in the Best American series. Either way, there seems to be a shying away from youth and fresh talent the closer we get to the end; only one author in the whole book, Gerald Early, was born after the 1940s, and the final word comes from an 82-year-old Saul Bellow. Though it is cool to see later authors referring to earlier, also-included ones: like watching the process of literary canonization play out before your eyes.

Most of the folks I’d expect to see do show up, though there were a couple of surprising absences (Audre Lorde? David Foster Wallace?) and plenty of potential candidates left out. For instance, I’d have been okay with foregoing the Updikean meditation on the penis in favor of, say, something by Toni Morrison. Still, I greatly enjoyed this overall; the authors I already liked were in good form, I gained a new interest in several others, and added at least one name (Loren Eiseley) to my reading list that I’d never even heard before.

Here are my individual reviews of each essay, if that’s something anyone is interested in:


Mark Twain - “Corn-pone Opinions” (1901)

Sedate, minimalistic, almost depressive Twain. Not published in his lifetime, so I wonder if he would have jazzed it up more otherwise—though I haven’t read much of his other nonfiction, and don’t know the usual style. Blunt commentary on social and political conformity which certainly made me think about my own tendencies in this area, but a bit too barebones in its argument (essentially: most of us form opinions based on what we think will please those around us rather than on rational thought) to feel really revelatory.

W.E.B. Du Bois - “Of the Coming of John” (1903)

A sort of parable (originally a chapter from The Souls of Black Folk) about a young Black man who returns to his southern hometown after being educated in the north and faces a variety of unanticipated consequences for his new outlook. The second piece in the collection and already expectations about the “essay” as a form are being challenged—Du Bois makes his argument via a narrative with archetypal characters instead of through, well, argument. Lush prose and a powerful, tragic ending that I think will linger with me. Another reminder that I need to read more Du Bois.

Henry Adams - “A Law of Acceleration” (1906)

A weird selection (a chapter from The Education of Henry Adams) which uses absolutely impenetrable pseudo-scientific language to describe the explosion of technological developments in the 19th century and to speculate about those to come in the 20th. The core idea is interesting, especially from the readerly vantage point of 120 years of exponential growth later, but again, the style is truly horrible, and while I think Adams is getting at something real, his “law”—complete with made-up mathematical “proofs”—is a poor way of getting it across. A bad pick for this anthology imo.

John Muir - “Stickeen” (1909)

A wilderness adventure narrative by the famous naturalist and conservationist, involving a lovable dog companion. Seems to be a favorite among other reviewers but didn’t do very much for me. Muir writes vividly, but he tends to pile on the details, and I’ve never been much for dog stories. This also doesn’t really feel like it’s saying very much when put up against the strong social commentary of the last three essays, though I suppose it’s good to have a break sometimes. This is the last piece from before 1910, and so far the feel is still very 19th century. I wonder when the shift will start—maybe post-WWI?

William James - “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910)

A really interesting piece of anti-war writing which makes the argument that we will never successfully abolish war unless we find a “moral equivalent” that echoes its most appealing aspects (discipline, camaraderie, innovation, civic pride, a sense of working together for the greater good). James argues for a sort of mandatory civil service which would cut across class lines and guide the energies of young people into difficult but rewarding labor for the benefit of the nation—shades of FDR’s New Deal from a couple of decades later. A few of James’ examples and points of emphasis have aged poorly but for the most part I admired his compassionate levelheadedness, which would of course go totally unheeded as the world toppled into its largest war yet just four years later, and remains unheeded, at least in the U.S., to this day.

Randolph Bourne - “The Handicapped” (1911)

A candid meditation on disability by a disabled author. I was wondering a couple of essays ago when the tone would start to feel more modern, and this one definitely does, in both its themes and its style—I often had to remind myself I wasn’t reading something from decades later. While I had a little trouble settling into Bourne’s rhythms (probably due more to my own headspace than anything else), I was impressed by his outlook and found a lot of his ideas on solitude and fulfillment in the face of adversity resonant. Sadly Bourne’s biography casts the essay in a tragic light: he was only 25 when it was published, and he talks a lot about how rewarding adulthood is after the struggles of a disabled youth; but he would die just seven years later of Spanish flu.

John Jay Chapman - “Coatesville” (1912)

A short, searing speech given on the one-year anniversary of a horrific lynching in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. (Evidently hundreds took part in the lynching, while only two attended the speech.) Chapman doesn’t mince words as he indicts the American people at large for the moral rot within them and argues that the evils of slavery have not faded simply because the institution was formally abolished. It’s startling, in a good way, to read such a righteously uncompromising take on this subject by a white author from this era, though the conclusion—calling upon God to change the hearts of white Americans rather than advocating for a more tangible solution—feels like a bit of a copout.

Jane Addams - “The Devil Baby at Hull-House” (1916)

The first selection by a woman. Reformer and early feminist Jane Addams describes the emergence of an urban legend claiming that a cursed “devil baby” (with various purported origins, usually relating to a husband’s wrongdoing) was being kept at the famous Chicago settlement house, which for weeks attracted crowds of people hoping to see the child. Addams’ real interest is in the way this folktale seemed to capture the imaginations of working-class immigrant women in particular, inspiring them to share stories of their own hardships at the hands of men. It’s a moving piece which does a good job conveying both the suffering and the resilience of these women, though I suspect these reflections would have been just as powerful without the slightly perplexing framing device of the devil baby story.

T.S. Eliot - “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

As the title implies, Eliot waxes critical about the relationship between individual poets and literary tradition writ large. As a writer myself I found a few points thought-provoking, but it’s a pretty stuffy, intellectualizing affair and I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t write caring all that much. A funny inclusion in this “American” collection since Eliot, five years into his British residency, is already taking pains to position himself as an “English” or “European” poet.

Ernest Hemingway - “Pamplona in July” (1923)

A bit of newspaper reportage by a young Hemingway about the annual bullfight in Pamplona, Spain (which is preceded by the famous Running of the Bulls). A typical Hemingway theme, and you can tell he was still polishing his signature style, but there are some strong moments and more humor than you usually get with him. There’s even a bit of self-deprecation, as he admits he’s not as brave or dashing as a celebrity bullfighter admired by “Mrs. Hemingway.” No wonder this was only reprinted posthumously.

H.L. Mencken - “The Hills of Zion” (1925)

Mostly a description of a rural worship service, of the convulsing-and-speaking-in-tongues kind, which Mencken claims to have witnessed while in Tennessee reporting on the Scopes trial. There’s no love lost between me and evangelicals, but Mencken’s leering and sneering tone towards these poor Appalachians is completely condescending and devoid of sincere curiosity or insight. His author bio mentions his admiration for Twain, but when Twain satirized these types of people he was at least doing it from the perspective of someone who had come from them and lived among them and understood what made them tick. Mencken pulls out some nice vocab words but otherwise I found no value in this at all, and suspect he made much of it up anyway.

Zora Neale Hurston - “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)

A classic and the first selection in this book that I’d read previously. I have nothing but admiration for Hurston and she’s as charming here as ever, though this particular piece isn’t my very favorite of her writings; it’s a bit too brief to get very deep into any of its ideas and I think I can see why some of her stances made her controversial among her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. Still, the voice is great and her observations about the way in which people “become” their racial category only when put in the company of those who view them as other are as sharp and as worth engaging with now as they were a century ago.

Edmund Wilson - “The Old Stone House” (1933)

A bit of an outlier for this collection so far, as it’s neither arguing anything in particular nor telling of any especially exciting event. Instead Wilson narrates a return visit to an old house in upstate New York where one branch of his family lived for generations, taking lots of digressions to share reminiscences, pieces of local history, and lists of antique objects found within the house. It’s a little self-indulgent and it would definitely bore some, but I enjoyed Wilson’s meditations on history and place as well as his languid, hypnotic prose—though I didn’t make the connection while reading, it felt a little like an American W.G. Sebald. I knew Wilson only as a name before, but now I’d like to seek out some of his other work.

Gertrude Stein - “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” (1935)

There are some reasonably interesting ideas here about how artists must forget themselves—temporarily losing their sense of identity and time—in order to create transcendent art, but to access those ideas you have to get through the unpunctuated tangle of Stein’s prose, which is never an undertaking I find especially rewarding.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - “The Crack-Up” (1936)

I’d heard of this one and was curious to read it but found it pretty tedious, and—surprisingly for Fitzgerald—poorly written as well. He recounts his mental breakdown in terms so vague and with so much mixing of metaphor that it’s hard to glean anything substantial from it or even follow the thread; thematically appropriate, maybe, but not satisfying reading. Still, a few passages resonated despite these barriers. I found Fitzgerald’s despair about the (ir)relevance of his work in the age of film “talkies” particularly relatable, given recent discourse about the arts in the era of generative AI—I had a similar crisis of faith last summer, which I hope will prove just as baseless.

James Thurber - “Sex Ex Machina” (1937)

A one-sided argument aimed at a pop psychologist I’ve never heard of about whether or not fear of cars and other modern technology is rooted in Freudian sex hangups. (Thurber says absolutely not.) I can’t say this is a debate I’ve ever been exposed to myself, and Thurber neither convinced me I should care nor tickled my funny bone, as he clearly hopes to do. The casual sexism doesn’t help—according to Thurber, 95% of women wouldn’t have the sense to avoid an oncoming car. The ‘30s have made a poor showing so far and this is maybe the most pointless-feeling inclusion yet.

Richard Wright - “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937)

Wright brings some much-needed seriousness and social consciousness back to the collection after two decades of mostly pretty inconsequential pieces. A harrowing series of snapshots of Wright’s early life in the Jim Crow South, underlining the life-or-death stakes of even the most casual or innocuous-seeming encounters with white people. Really unsettled me despite lots of prior reading on slavery and segregation, and for me pretty much typifies what the essay form at its best can be. I was interested to learn it was originally published as part of a New Deal WPA initiative. Imagine the U.S. government bankrolling writing like this today! I need to read Native Son very soon.

James Agee - “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (1938)

A short reminiscence about summer evenings in Agee’s childhood which mostly seems to function as a showcase for his lyrical prose. Much space dedicated to describing the look and sound of water sprayed from a garden hose. I won’t deny that Agee is a talented stylist but at this stage in my reading life I rarely get much from writing which makes a showy style its top priority. Also must be said that this nostalgic glimpse of southern (white) boyhood reads as much less picturesque than it’s meant to when placed right after Richard Wright’s bleak account of his own southern (Black) boyhood in the same era.

Robert Frost - “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939)

The foreword to an edition of Frost’s collected poems, basically just an explanation of his personal writing ethos. I don’t have a strong attachment to Frost’s poetry and found his prose here surprisingly difficult to hack through—the syntax is often weird to the point of illegibility and parts of speech are dropped for little discernible reason. (Ironically, given their respective poetic reputations, T.S. Eliot’s essay was far more conventional and less “modernist”-feeling than this is.) Coincidentally I read this the same day I finished teaching a half-semester of poetry myself, but despite the good timing I gleaned little from Frost’s insights, which mostly feel pretty standard despite the thorny style they’re wrapped up in.

E.B. White - “Once More to the Lake” (1941)

Another piece that’s essentially just a pretense to reminisce about childhood—if this collection is any indication, this subgenre must have really been picking up in popularity around this time. (Depression indicator?) Specifically, White describes taking his son on a summer trip to a lake in Maine where his own parents took him each year when he was a boy. Could have been really saccharine in another writer’s hands, but I thought White’s slightly melancholic reflections on aging and the passage of time were a good counterbalance and—maybe because I was reading after a party and was still slightly inebriated—I found this much more affecting than James Agee’s recent, similarly-themed essay.

S.J. Perelman - “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away” (1944)

Like the earlier Thurber piece, this started as a New Yorker column, and similarly consists of a humorist griping about modern life and technology in a predictably curmudgeonly way. Here the target is basically the 1940s equivalent of IKEA furniture and the like—prefab, assemble-at-home junk which is a pain to put together. Maybe this was fresher comic subject matter 80 years ago, but I guessed what I was in for the moment I read the title and I was pretty much on the money. I could personally do without any of the self-consciously “funny” entries in this collection—I love an author with a sense of humor, but this sort of thing is only going to suffer by comparison with the weightier pieces here. Good at least to have my suspicion confirmed that the New Yorker was always like this.

Langston Hughes - “Bop” (1949)

Apparently, amidst all his other literary undertakings, Langston Hughes wrote a regular newspaper column in which a character named “Simple” would hold dialogues with the narrator about topical issues of the day. This is one of those columns, on bebop music and the reason why, per Simple, it resonates more with Black listeners than white ones. I’m an admirer of Hughes and interested in this subject, but this is the shortest selection yet and there’s just really not a lot to sink the teeth into. I think it might have been a better idea on the editors’ parts to give us a series of Simple columns, creating a sense of a larger whole, rather than relying on this one fragmentary selection to represent such an influential author.

(Continued in the comments)

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously, this stuff is good. I discovered some new writers and some new favorites by old writers(The Crack Up, by Fitzgerald.) However, Joyce Carol Oates made these selections and she definitely did so with a historical sense. The collection could just as well have been called "Best Essays about America in the 20th Century." No surprises here, no experiments with form, and what to me felt like a sometimes annoyingly persistent "relevance." I guess I just have a thing for really, really, really, really well-written essays that don't have much to do with anything "important." Still, it's a don't miss.

[Vince Darcangelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faves:

Mark Twain: "Corn-pone Opinions"

Henry Adams: "A Law of Acceleration"

John Muir: "Stickeen"

William James: "The Moral Equivalent of War"

Randolph Bourne: "The Handicapped"

Jane Addams: "The Devil Baby at Hull-House"

H.L. Mencken: "The Hills of Zion"

F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The Crack-Up"

Tom Wolfe: "Putting Daddy On"

Vladimir Nabokov: "Perfect Past"

Michael Herr: "Illumination Rounds"

Joan Didion: "The White Album"

Gretel Ehrlich: "The Solace of Open Spaces"

Edward Hoagland: "Heaven and Nature"

Stephen Jay Gould: "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown"

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of these essays have heavy themes, and several are very similar--racism, violence... the many ways people can be cruel, especially to people who can't fight back. I would have liked it better if I could have spaced out the reading more, but as it is, the essays felt important, but like an anchor dragging my mood down.

[Vaibhav Dwivedi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This got me into reading again. Brown Wasps, A Drugstore in Winter and so many more beautiful essays. I think there's something very appealing about the essay format, to offer so much of lived experience in such a brief form.

[Thomas Ray]

Table of contents: https://search.schlowlibrary.org/Reco...

[Kate Laws · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent anthology of 20th Century American thought.

[Ryan Chevalier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprised by the lack of variety. Definitely some knock outs that carried the rest of the collection though

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I take issue with the superlative, because surely these can't be the "best" essays America has produced in the last century. Joyce Carol Oates's The Best American Essays of the Century would have been more apt a title. Then I wouldn't have held such high expectations reading it. In spite of some powerful selections here, it is also peppered with disappointments, and I was antsy to be done with the book. But unlike a novel I could easily chuck away, I couldn't risk missing out on what might be a better essay than the last.

My general takes:

1) Apart from John Muir's unforgettable Stickeen, the most unforgettable pieces here were written by women: Zora Hurston Neale, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Gretel Ehrlich, Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Annie Dillard.
2) Gertrude Stein's contribution is one of the few exceptions to #1; I wonder how her reading of it played out in Oxford and Cambridge back in 1936.
3) Potent essays on race relations and racial tension dominate the collection. If I were to sum up what I will recall from my reading of the book, foremost would be the African-American struggles so candidly documented here.
4) Martin Luther King's historic Letter from a Birmingham Jail was unexpectedly mediocre and hinted at vanity, especially when compared to the pieces written by Gerald Early, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Zora Hurston Neale.
5) In a book chock-full of quotable quotes, it is Zora Hurston Neale's words, in How It Feels to Be Colored Me, which left an imprint; I came across it in the first quarter of the book. What a validating coincidence for Alice Walker to have pounced on the same quote when I read her essay, Looking for Zora, midway through the book!

"But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

Zora Hurston Neale, 1928

[Jennifer Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I couldn't get ahold of Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces at the library, I did the next best thing: I found that namesake essay in this lovely book of essays and enjoyed not only it but many others besides. Compilations can be tricky and uneven, but editor Joyce Carol Oates has done an excellent job curating truly some of the finest short essays of (and about) the 20th century. (And by the way: The Solace of Open Spaces was an excellent piece, beautifully and poetically written, and I think her full book would be worth buying.)

I don't get into podcasts, but this book fills what is probably that same kind of void for me. It's like listening to one of the long-form-story NPR programs, only I get to READ these wonderful essays myself, taking my time discovering, sampling, and digesting. When my husband and I were first married, we vowed to not buy a TV for a year so we would spend that time with each other instead of lost in a screen. I remember that year with great fondness. We would talk or listen to the radio and discuss what we heard. We'd read the newspaper or books aloud to each other and have lively conversations.

As I read this, it took me back to that simpler time. I thought, this would be a good book to have on the coffee table for a quiet night when there's a fire in the fireplace, the TV's off, and the ever-present smartphones are set aside. Maybe if we had this book handy, we would feel inspired to read aloud to each other--as people did for enjoyment for many years before screens--at least from time to time. Sounds so lovely to me. It's worth a try!

[Philina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars for this huge collection of essays. I think the three stars are due to the book's nature: a collection. Naturally, a collection contains not only essays which I absolutely loved and would have given five stars, but also essays I found absolutely boring and would have given one or two stars.
Therefore, the sum of all essays is the middle rating.

The essays I really enjoyed were:
John Muir - Stickeen
Ernest Hemingway - Pamplona in July
James Thurber - Sex Ex Machina
Richard Wright - The Ethics of Living Jim Crow
James Baldwin - Notes of a Native Son
Martin Luther King Jr. - Letter From Birmingham Jail
N. Scott Momaday - The Way to Rainy Mountain
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maxine Hong Kingston - No Name Woman
Alice Walker - Looking For Zora
Richard Rodriguez - Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood
Gretel Ehrlich - The Solace of Open Spaces (I guess my favorite)
William Manchester - Okinawa
Gerald Early - Life With Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant
Joyce Carol Oates - They All Just Went Away (interesting how I thought her writing style was horrible reading the Introduction, but then really liked her essay)

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

With relatively few exceptions, there wasn't anything in here I didn't enjoy... Oates did a solid job of selecting not only the best essays, but also essays from a wide breadth of American life. Plenty of women, plenty of writers of color, articles on war, articles on poverty, articles on immigration, articles on culture, articles on science, articles on the environment, and all while staying pretty geographically diverse.

There are, of course, the less impressive articles, the ones that hit me the wrong way or struck me as pretentious, but for every one of those, there were three or four that were brilliant.

[Liana · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was enlightening enough, but most of the essays deal with the pitfalls and triumphs of American tolerance, having to do mostly with what it is like to live in America as a minority (this is not a bad thing, though). It would have been nice to see more variety in topics. However, the subjects discussed did vary with each passing essay in at least one regard--being Jewish, being Hispanic, being black (three of the most moving essays in the series). Since this is only volume one, I think I should be expecting different explored topics for the second.

[Briannesha · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best collection of essays from a wide range of writers.

[Joelle Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essay is such a rich treasure; I had forgotten how much I enjoy to read and write them. I have been struggling with writer's block, but now I remember why it is I love to write. Some of them made me laugh; some of them made me hold my breath until the end, when I let it out with one big WHOOSH. I was moved to tears, to anger. And with some I read the last sentence and looked up at the wall, struggling to believe the writer hadn't reached out and physically sucker punched me. Not everyone writes the same; we all shouldn't even strive to write the same. My art and your art are as unique as our fingerprints. They are as unique to our identities as our souls are to our bodies, and that is why I love the personal essay.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an effort to get more essays into my reading, I picked this up with the intention of reading one essay per night before bed (this was also meant to reduce my screen time before sleeping). I didn't stick to it every night, but I wasn't too terribly far off, and I did enjoy having a short, complete something to read at bedtime, so I already have the next selection sitting on the nightstand.
As for the book itself, it was, like any collection of multiple works, a mixed bag. Some of the pieces were truly excellent, and some were so dull that I struggle to understand how they ever made it into print, let alone got selected for a "best of" anthology. Most were between these two extremes, of course.

[Nik Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

would give it 5 stars, but the plot seemed to jump around, almost as if each "chapter" (they really didn't feel like chapters tbh) was written by a different author with a completely different writing style and way of words.

[Thomas Schulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a lot of great reading here. The carefully curated collection of essays starts strong with Twain's observation of natural American clanishness using the metaphor of "corne-pone opinions". This is almost the best of the best. For me the best here is muir's celebration of Stickeen the explorer dog. I can picture the plucky animal conquering his own fears at the glacier bridge and the twinkling in his eyes as he recollects the close call with Muir. Also very good is pioneer community organizer jane Addams seeing in women their personal struggles in their desires to see it purported "devil baby". For the Hemingway piece about the running of the bulls i am further confirmed that at this point in my life I am unimpressed with his fiction but find his nonfiction enjoyable enough. Mencken's gonzo reporting of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" reads like Hunter S. himself. I also am starting to see emerge from the dark night of my ignorance the constellation of brights in American literature: Sontag (brilliant disection of "camp" that I now know predates Friday the 13th), independent polymath Edmund Wilson, James Agee, etc. Didion discursive assaying and of the turbulent 60s is in the Montaigne tradition and Bellow's "Graven Images" is an insightful musing on photography that could extend from 1997 to today's struggles with 24hour news camers body cameras, etc.

These are chronologically arranged but I think topical could have been better: death (two on suicide), the arts, society. Even our long struggles with racism: Wright, Angelou, Hurston and even Alice Walker's poignant search for Hurston's grave.

[Wren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a year to read this anthology of essays ranging from Mark Twain's "Corn-pone Opinions" to Saul Bellow's "Graven Images." In it, Joyce Carol Oats presents a collection of essays published throughout the century on topics both personal and public. Some are reflections on childhood, some ruminate on public events such as wars, civil rights events, and headline-grabbing crimes. The collection offers diversity of race and region, but it's shifted to represent writing by those who established their reputation as writers in the early to mid century. There are precious few essays published in the 1980s and 1990s by the under 40 crowd. There's a very strong presence of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Nevertheless, it's a strong collection with a helpful appendix of "also rans." My favorites are as follows: John Muir's "Stickeen," Jane Addams' "The Devil Baby at Hull-House," Mary McCarthy's "Artist in Uniform," "Rachel Carson's "The Marginal World," Loren Eiseley's "The Brown Wasps," Donald Hall's, "A Hundred Thousand STraightened Nails," John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens," Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," Alice Walker's "Looking for Zora," Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse," Stephen Jay Gould's "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown, and Gerald EArly's "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant."

[Martyn Lovell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a large collection of 55 non-fiction essays spread over around 570 pages. The essays were all written by Americans in the twentieth century. Beyond that, there are few constraints.

A wide diversity of writing styles, motivations, themes and opinions are represented. Some were highly enjoyable, others difficult to get through - though the short average length means that no one essay is too hard. For me the best part of the book are the essays by African-American writers, whose work I have little experience of.

I find it hard to imagine the criteria that led to this set being the right chosen set. This isn't the essay equivalent of reading Pride and Prejudice or Romeo and Juliet. This is a decent selection, but with a few exceptions it is hard to say which of these will survive the test of time as classics.

I read this book end-to-end because that is my preference, but it is probably not a good way to tackle the material. Dipping in and out might have been better.

A decent read, but not great.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the election I barely read the news for a month - instead I read this book of essays. This was a good salve to understand the United States and all this country has been through. Here, "Corn Pone opinions" by Mark Twain:

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

p.s. if anyone in Seattle wants to borrow, happy to lend!

[Stephen Cranney · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's hard to rate a collection of essays, but taken as a whole I thought they did a rather poor job of picking which ones were the best. I have no idea what John Muir's dog has to do with anything, but maybe I'm too dense to catch the subtle symbolism. However, some of the essays are solid and should be read by everybody. The ones I thought were worth my time and I would recommend are: "The Handicapped" by Randolph Bourne, "The Devil Baby at Hull House" by Jane Addams, "The Marginal World" by Rachel Carson, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (Martin Luther King), and "Okinawa, the bloodies battle of all," by William Manchester.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a terrific, interesting collection.
I emerge as I went in with James Baldwin and Joan Didion my favorite essayists, honorable mentions for Susan Sontag, Lewis Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov and Annie Dillard (and editor Oates herself). Of the rest, the ones new to me, I liked some more than others of course; revelations for me here include John Muir (had no idea he was such a good prose stylist and storyteller), Jane Addams (really interesting cultural reading), Loren Eiseley, Cynthia Ozick, and Stephen Jay Gould. And as a whole the collection offers an interesting account, from a variety of perspectives, of the obsessions and predilections of 20th century America.

[Joshua Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I found many of these essays to be lacking in merit to the extent that they be included in a book titled the "Best...of the Century" those were yet of high quality. Those that I did enjoy are of the very highest quality writing; these essays provided writing that transported the reader, evoked feelings, and clothed memories in the flesh of vivid imagery and rich description. I feel my perspective enlightened and my views expanded from reading this work, which I feel is the best that can be said for any piece of writing, but most especially the form of the essay. I cannot more highly recommend this book.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan, the editors of "The Best American Essays of the Century," made many wonderful selections for this anthology. My personal favorites include Joan Didion's "The White Album," H.L. Mencken's "The Hills of Zion," and W.E.B. Du Bois's "Of the Coming of John." There also are fine pieces by John McPhee, Mark Twain, Rachel Carson, Richard Rodriguez and other writers, some of them journalists, some essayists, and some better known as novelists. This anthology is a well-rounded survey of some of the most notable nonfiction American writing of the 20th century.

[Henna Bagha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this entire book for my Creative Nonfiction class and most of it was fantastic. I really enjoyed most of these essays and they really braid together well in terms of time. Especially with the things that matter most in today's time and how their relevance is shown. Some of these pieces are absolutely beautiful. I think I would've enjoyed this more if I didn't have to read it for class though. This book did however create really engaging conversations about how we craft our own pieces as well.

[Shelby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed reviews for this one: some of the essays were a bit tedious to get through, and perhaps the meaning was just lost on me; others were really incredible, and if I could be half as good a writer someday, I would be happy. The introduction, by Joyce Carol Oates, is written by someone who really knows the craft, and because I read it before reading the essays, I had more appreciation for them.