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The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970
A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form—from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion—s elected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate
The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America—racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them—proved fruitful topics for America's best minds.
In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.
The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America—racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them—proved fruitful topics for America's best minds.
In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.
544 pages, Paperback
Published April 6, 2021
36 people are currently reading
208 people want to read
About the author
Phillip Lopate
106 books104 followersPhillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 29, 2021
Some held up quite well (Joan Didion, Rachel Carson.....). Some were interesting as period pieces (Gore Vidal on 1968 republican convention that nominated Nixon). Some I'd never heard of and were intriguing slice-of-intellectual-life-at-the-time (Paul Goodman on what was wrong with schools, advocating for experiments like just excusing a few years' worth of kids from going to school!).....
.........and then quite a few of no particular interest [to me]. Which is fine -- it's not difficult to skim in an essay collection.
Never really got a handle on a convincing argument that this post-WWII period thru the 60s was any better than others for American essay writers, but you need a hook to sell such collections, so why not?
.........and then quite a few of no particular interest [to me]. Which is fine -- it's not difficult to skim in an essay collection.
Never really got a handle on a convincing argument that this post-WWII period thru the 60s was any better than others for American essay writers, but you need a hook to sell such collections, so why not?
November 20, 2021
In Phillip Lopate's long writing career he's been novelist, film critic, poet, and essayist. But his greatest strength may be as anthologist of essays. He edited the 1994 collection The Art of the Personal Essay, which can probably today be considered iconic. That's a good word because it fits the essays he's assembled to represent the period he considers the "golden age" of the American essay, 1945 to 1970. The essayists themselves are iconic. They begin with James Agee and end with Joan Didion. In between, all are names you've heard of. Perhaps you've even read the representative essay Lopate selected for each of the writers. Another reason they're iconic is that if you're interested in a particular area--say civil rights or baseball or the artistic circles of 1960s Greenwich Village--chances are you've already read the essay addressing it. Another strength of the collection is the wide scope of its subjects. I was unfamiliar with some of the ideas covered in some of these essays but was engaged by all of them, even making note of some authors for further reading. Because the collection begins 76 years ago, we revisit some old ideas we've moved away from or revised. Though some attitudes are dated, or at least questionable, all have in common that they're very well written. That might be Lopate's most important consideration in choosing an essay and author, that it's constructed from consistently good sentences one after another, boom boom boom.
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January 7, 2022The introduction to this compendium gets straight in there with the claim that "The essay seeks out the middle way", celebrating it as a liberal form right back to Montaigne, and applauding its avoidance of extremes – which, given how 'centrist' and 'liberal' have now become such spectacularly dirty words, helps cement an impression of an artefact from another time. All the more so for the fact that so many of the contributors are people I remember being alive, but that at the time of publication, only two remained that way – with one of those, Joan Didion, departing before I finished it, and the other, Edward Hoagland, potentially set to see 90 this year. Still, for all that sense of a lost age, it also gets straight in with reminding us how cyclical these things can be; the first selection is James Agee on the uneasy peace after the Second World War, the worries of worse to come, the uneven distribution of hope. There's much discussion from the time of the fifties as an age of conformity, which now inevitably makes one think with a little hope of the sixties which were to follow; later on, Philip Roth's Writing About Jews is a spirited response to criticism that he doesn't present "a balanced portrayal of Jews as we know them". His exasperated demolition of rabbis mistaking, in so many words, novels for sociological studies would be very useful reading for a certain school of criticism today. Other essays are more firmly of their time, like George F Kennan's originally anonymous expansion of his Long Telegram, a founding document of the Cold War but also much more measured than that status might suggest, advocating setting a good example as an approach more likely to bear fruit than military confrontation. If only the CIA had paid attention to that bit. He is perceptive, too, on how 'truth' worked in the USSR - though alas, that now seems to be how it works in most countries' politics. But beyond historical interest, even beyond the political sphere, some thoughts here remain applicable in everyday life: "It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy, for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right."
If this begins to sound like Lopate has skilfully evaded the potential ivory tower air of the project, that is not always the case. Edmund Wilson, of whom I've heard, is represented by a memoir of Paul Rosenfeld, of whom I have not. As Wilson offers caveat after caveat as to the abilities of this archetypically epicene figure, I increasingly found myself waiting for the punchline, but presumably this was the sincere original from which decades of spoofs were drawn. Walter Lippman delivers a terribly polite and reasonable broadside against the tyranny of the majority where, even though I agree with it, the tone is so infuriatingly condescending that I almost found myself sympathising with Trump voters. Similarly, while much of the old here can still feel new, elsewhere - Randall Jarrell whinging about consumerism - it just feels very old; I almost want to buy a rockabilly record simply to spite his shade. Elizabeth Hardwick tweaking Boston's nose may have seemed daring at the time, but now you wonder what point it could have for anyone bar a Bostonian wanting a gently outraged chuckle at how places change; if this was really the best of her work, that doesn't suggest an enormous claim on posterity's attention. And Updike is here with a piece on baseball which is largely incomprehensible to the British reader; osmosis may have left more sporting terminology than I'd like in my head, but even my foolish countrymen have more sense than to get quite this intricate about rounders.
And yet, even in the more trying stretches of the anthology, one picks things up. Who knew 'the self-fulfilling prophecy' was such a recent phrase? Not that I'd ever considered the matter – I suppose I must have thought it an unknown known – but I would have assumed it would be somewhere between the scholastics and the 19th century, possibly coined regarding Oedipus or his monotheist knock-off St Julian - but no, Robert K Merton (1910-2003), who also gave us 'unintended consequences' and 'role models', and its first illustration was race relations. On which note, particularly given the title and the collection's overall focus on the US, it's interesting to have James Baldwin represented by a piece on life as the first black man in a Swiss village; obviously he finds it reflecting light on America, but all the same. I thought perhaps the hits were too much the obvious hits, but elsewhere Lopate is happy to stay canonical with deservedly famous stuff like MLK from Birmingham jail, Sontag on camp, and The Paranoid Style In American Politics – from which I learned the glorious detail that when not inventing the telegraph, Samuel Morse was an active campaigner against the Jesuits' alleged efforts to put a Hapsburg on America's throne. And given the telegraph is the first step on the road to the Internet, you could even derive from this a meta-conspiracy theory about why the web is such a hotbed of conspiracy theories... Speaking of which, here's Mary McCarthy on an encounter with an anti-Semitic colonel - "The desolate truth was that the colonel was extremely stupid, and it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. [...] From this, it would seem, followed the querulous obstinacy with which the anti-Semite clung to his concept; to be deprived of this intellectual tool by missionaries of tolerance would be, for persons like the colonel, the equivalent of Western man's losing the syllogism: a lapse into animal darkness." Thank goodness things have changed so much since, eh, readers?
Equally, though, there are the times when you're brought up short by quite how much things have changed, the way things laughed off as absolute and unshakable givens now seem so alien. Consider Irving Howe's This Age Of Conformity. Sometimes when this utters sentiments now inconceivable, it is precisely in the context of debunking them, as when mocking (and he mocks well) Lionel Trilling's risible claim that the culture of 1953 was livelier than that of 1923. But elsewhere, how about "the independence possible to a professor of sociology is usually greater than that possible to a writer of television scripts"? Between academia's transition into business and TV's transition into art, that idea now looks utterly outlandish. Or saying, this time in agreement with Trilling, that liberalism is now not only the dominant but the sole ideology of America, that this could only change if conservatives went into the streets, "acquiring a mass, perhaps reactionary dynamic", which surely even avowed conservatives don't want. Well, about that... Or there's Rachel Carson, who is represented by a chapter of Silent Spring, which feels like cheating - on top of which, for all the good she undoubtedly did, it opens with the entirely untrue statement "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world." But then I realised, I don't know when we learned that the cyanobacteria had entirely upended Earth's atmosphere, so maybe it was true then, or thought to be. And in terms of things which have aged awkwardly for other reasons, it's debatable whether the collection really needed two pieces on Lolita, even if Nabokov's own remains a masterpiece, his discussion of the novel's "nerves, [...] secret points, [...] subliminal coordinates" one of the wisest things I've ever seen a writer say about their own work. Except that then he finishes up with a lament for his "second-rate brand of English" and you wonder whether he knew anything at all.
What else? Flannery O'Connor's Some Aspects Of The Grotesque In Southern Fiction, for one, like Roth addressing what we'd now call 'representation': "I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs." And like Roth, doing it with a wonderful lack of respect either for her own tribe or the other: "Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." But some of my favourite pieces were the later ones, largely by writers of whom I'd never heard. Edwin Denby is introduced as "the dean of American dance criticism", and I thought, oh joy, this is going to be another one for baffled skimming a la Updike – but no, turns out the guy was good on criticism, and indeed art appreciation, and for that matter education, in general. N. Scott Momaday draws on his Kiowa Indian heritage, talking about the act of deicide his grandmother witnessed, and the changed land that left behind. Albert Murray's The Blues Idiom And The Mainstream may not entirely practice what it preaches, but I can forgive much for the line "All human effort beyond the lowest level of struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style." And in a collection whose themes are mostly social or political, one powerful exception is Loren Eiseley's haunting study of insomnia, One Night's Dying.
(Netgalley ARC)
If this begins to sound like Lopate has skilfully evaded the potential ivory tower air of the project, that is not always the case. Edmund Wilson, of whom I've heard, is represented by a memoir of Paul Rosenfeld, of whom I have not. As Wilson offers caveat after caveat as to the abilities of this archetypically epicene figure, I increasingly found myself waiting for the punchline, but presumably this was the sincere original from which decades of spoofs were drawn. Walter Lippman delivers a terribly polite and reasonable broadside against the tyranny of the majority where, even though I agree with it, the tone is so infuriatingly condescending that I almost found myself sympathising with Trump voters. Similarly, while much of the old here can still feel new, elsewhere - Randall Jarrell whinging about consumerism - it just feels very old; I almost want to buy a rockabilly record simply to spite his shade. Elizabeth Hardwick tweaking Boston's nose may have seemed daring at the time, but now you wonder what point it could have for anyone bar a Bostonian wanting a gently outraged chuckle at how places change; if this was really the best of her work, that doesn't suggest an enormous claim on posterity's attention. And Updike is here with a piece on baseball which is largely incomprehensible to the British reader; osmosis may have left more sporting terminology than I'd like in my head, but even my foolish countrymen have more sense than to get quite this intricate about rounders.
And yet, even in the more trying stretches of the anthology, one picks things up. Who knew 'the self-fulfilling prophecy' was such a recent phrase? Not that I'd ever considered the matter – I suppose I must have thought it an unknown known – but I would have assumed it would be somewhere between the scholastics and the 19th century, possibly coined regarding Oedipus or his monotheist knock-off St Julian - but no, Robert K Merton (1910-2003), who also gave us 'unintended consequences' and 'role models', and its first illustration was race relations. On which note, particularly given the title and the collection's overall focus on the US, it's interesting to have James Baldwin represented by a piece on life as the first black man in a Swiss village; obviously he finds it reflecting light on America, but all the same. I thought perhaps the hits were too much the obvious hits, but elsewhere Lopate is happy to stay canonical with deservedly famous stuff like MLK from Birmingham jail, Sontag on camp, and The Paranoid Style In American Politics – from which I learned the glorious detail that when not inventing the telegraph, Samuel Morse was an active campaigner against the Jesuits' alleged efforts to put a Hapsburg on America's throne. And given the telegraph is the first step on the road to the Internet, you could even derive from this a meta-conspiracy theory about why the web is such a hotbed of conspiracy theories... Speaking of which, here's Mary McCarthy on an encounter with an anti-Semitic colonel - "The desolate truth was that the colonel was extremely stupid, and it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. [...] From this, it would seem, followed the querulous obstinacy with which the anti-Semite clung to his concept; to be deprived of this intellectual tool by missionaries of tolerance would be, for persons like the colonel, the equivalent of Western man's losing the syllogism: a lapse into animal darkness." Thank goodness things have changed so much since, eh, readers?
Equally, though, there are the times when you're brought up short by quite how much things have changed, the way things laughed off as absolute and unshakable givens now seem so alien. Consider Irving Howe's This Age Of Conformity. Sometimes when this utters sentiments now inconceivable, it is precisely in the context of debunking them, as when mocking (and he mocks well) Lionel Trilling's risible claim that the culture of 1953 was livelier than that of 1923. But elsewhere, how about "the independence possible to a professor of sociology is usually greater than that possible to a writer of television scripts"? Between academia's transition into business and TV's transition into art, that idea now looks utterly outlandish. Or saying, this time in agreement with Trilling, that liberalism is now not only the dominant but the sole ideology of America, that this could only change if conservatives went into the streets, "acquiring a mass, perhaps reactionary dynamic", which surely even avowed conservatives don't want. Well, about that... Or there's Rachel Carson, who is represented by a chapter of Silent Spring, which feels like cheating - on top of which, for all the good she undoubtedly did, it opens with the entirely untrue statement "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world." But then I realised, I don't know when we learned that the cyanobacteria had entirely upended Earth's atmosphere, so maybe it was true then, or thought to be. And in terms of things which have aged awkwardly for other reasons, it's debatable whether the collection really needed two pieces on Lolita, even if Nabokov's own remains a masterpiece, his discussion of the novel's "nerves, [...] secret points, [...] subliminal coordinates" one of the wisest things I've ever seen a writer say about their own work. Except that then he finishes up with a lament for his "second-rate brand of English" and you wonder whether he knew anything at all.
What else? Flannery O'Connor's Some Aspects Of The Grotesque In Southern Fiction, for one, like Roth addressing what we'd now call 'representation': "I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs." And like Roth, doing it with a wonderful lack of respect either for her own tribe or the other: "Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." But some of my favourite pieces were the later ones, largely by writers of whom I'd never heard. Edwin Denby is introduced as "the dean of American dance criticism", and I thought, oh joy, this is going to be another one for baffled skimming a la Updike – but no, turns out the guy was good on criticism, and indeed art appreciation, and for that matter education, in general. N. Scott Momaday draws on his Kiowa Indian heritage, talking about the act of deicide his grandmother witnessed, and the changed land that left behind. Albert Murray's The Blues Idiom And The Mainstream may not entirely practice what it preaches, but I can forgive much for the line "All human effort beyond the lowest level of struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style." And in a collection whose themes are mostly social or political, one powerful exception is Loren Eiseley's haunting study of insomnia, One Night's Dying.
(Netgalley ARC)
January 4, 2022
Phillip Lopate has a long list of titles gathered throughout his career; Novelist, Critic, Poet etc. but perhaps one of his greatest gifts to the literary world is this incredible anthology of essays providing a wide range of thought provoking pieces spanning 25 years. The essays range from a bit older and possibly not your cup of tea to absolutely brilliant, relevant, and fascinating. Some of the brightest thinkers of our time are represented in this anthology, which is well thought out, organized, and easy to navigate. There is something in this brilliant collection for every person, no matter your typical topic preferences.
Thank you so much to Netgalley and of course the brilliant Phillip Lopate for providing me with an e-copy of this lovely collection and allowing me to share my honest opinion.
I highly recommend you pick this collection up as soon as possible.
Thank you so much to Netgalley and of course the brilliant Phillip Lopate for providing me with an e-copy of this lovely collection and allowing me to share my honest opinion.
I highly recommend you pick this collection up as soon as possible.
March 4, 2021
This collection, edited by Phillip Lopate, reads as a who’s who of great writers and thinkers. Some of the authors whose essays can be found here include James Agee, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, E.B. White, Norman Mailer and Martin Luther King among others.
The book begins with a helpful and detailed exploration of what may have led to this time period yielding so many exceptional essays. Each entry then has a brief introduction.
This is a generous compendium. Readers can dip in and out, always finding something of interest. It is worth a read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions are my own.
The book begins with a helpful and detailed exploration of what may have led to this time period yielding so many exceptional essays. Each entry then has a brief introduction.
This is a generous compendium. Readers can dip in and out, always finding something of interest. It is worth a read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions are my own.
February 25, 2021
One must be grateful to Philipp Lopate for compiling & editing this wonderful collection of essays, a wide range of thought provoking pieces spanning 25 years, probably the most turbulent of the 20th century in America
Whether it is subjective, controversial, artistic, religious, political or philosophical, this book offers to the reader a delightful sample of a unique American tradition, a celebration of the best in American prose writing.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Knopf/Doubleday for the opportunity to read this wonderful collection of essays prior to its
Whether it is subjective, controversial, artistic, religious, political or philosophical, this book offers to the reader a delightful sample of a unique American tradition, a celebration of the best in American prose writing.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Knopf/Doubleday for the opportunity to read this wonderful collection of essays prior to its
May 7, 2022
I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review
This is a strong collection of essays. It took me a while to make my way through them, but there were only a handful that I skipped (mainly because the subject matter just didn't interest me).
The essays are arranged chronologically and touch upon various topics, including politics, sociology, food, art, pop culture, and literature.
Essays included:
- James Agee, *The Nation: Democratic Vistas (1945)*
- Reinhold Niebuhr, *Humor and Faith* (1946)
- George F. Kennan, *The Sources of Soviet Conduct* (1947)
- Edmund Wilson, *Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases* (1947)
- Walter Lippmann, *The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy (1947)*
- Robert Warshow, *The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1948)*
- Harold Rosenberg, *The Herd of Independent Minds (1948)*
- Robert K. Merton, *The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1948)*
- Leslie Fiedler, *Come Back To the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey! (1948)*
- James Baldwin, *Stranger in the Village* (1953)
- Mary McCarthy, *Artists in Uniform (1953)*
- Irving Howe, *This Age of Conformity* (1954)
- E. B. White, *Sootfall and Fallout (1956)*
- Vladimir Nabokov, *On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)*
- Saul Bellow, *The University as Villain (1957)*
- Lionel Trilling, *The Last Lover (1958)*
- A. J. Liebling, *A Good Appetite (1959)*
- Seymour Krim, *Making It! (1959)*
- Elizabeth Hardwick, *Boston* (1959)
- Flannery O’Connor, *Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction* (1960)
- John Updike, *Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (1960)*
- Randall Jarrell, *A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960)*
- Clement Greenberg, *Modernist Painting, (1961)*
- Rachel Carson, *The Obligation to Endure (1962)*
- Norman Mailer, *An Evening With Jackie Kennedy (1962)*
- Martin Luther King, Jr., *Letter from Birmingham Jail* (1963)
- Philip Roth, *Writing About Jews* (1963)
- Susan Sontag, *Notes on “Camp” (1964)*
- Richard Hofstadter, *The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)*
- Paul Goodman, *The Universal Trap (1964)*
- Tom Wolfe, *The Girl of the Year (1964)*
- Edwin Denby, *Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965)*
- N. Scott Momaday, *The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)*
- Gore Vidal, *The Twenty-Ninth Republican Convention (1969)*
- Albert Murray, *The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream (1970)*
- Loren Eiseley, *One Night’s Dying (1970)*
- Edward Hoagland, *Home is Two Places (1970)*
- Joan Didion, *On The Morning After The Sixties (1970)*
This is a strong collection of essays. It took me a while to make my way through them, but there were only a handful that I skipped (mainly because the subject matter just didn't interest me).
The essays are arranged chronologically and touch upon various topics, including politics, sociology, food, art, pop culture, and literature.
Essays included:
- James Agee, *The Nation: Democratic Vistas (1945)*
- Reinhold Niebuhr, *Humor and Faith* (1946)
- George F. Kennan, *The Sources of Soviet Conduct* (1947)
- Edmund Wilson, *Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases* (1947)
- Walter Lippmann, *The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy (1947)*
- Robert Warshow, *The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1948)*
- Harold Rosenberg, *The Herd of Independent Minds (1948)*
- Robert K. Merton, *The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1948)*
- Leslie Fiedler, *Come Back To the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey! (1948)*
- James Baldwin, *Stranger in the Village* (1953)
- Mary McCarthy, *Artists in Uniform (1953)*
- Irving Howe, *This Age of Conformity* (1954)
- E. B. White, *Sootfall and Fallout (1956)*
- Vladimir Nabokov, *On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)*
- Saul Bellow, *The University as Villain (1957)*
- Lionel Trilling, *The Last Lover (1958)*
- A. J. Liebling, *A Good Appetite (1959)*
- Seymour Krim, *Making It! (1959)*
- Elizabeth Hardwick, *Boston* (1959)
- Flannery O’Connor, *Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction* (1960)
- John Updike, *Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (1960)*
- Randall Jarrell, *A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960)*
- Clement Greenberg, *Modernist Painting, (1961)*
- Rachel Carson, *The Obligation to Endure (1962)*
- Norman Mailer, *An Evening With Jackie Kennedy (1962)*
- Martin Luther King, Jr., *Letter from Birmingham Jail* (1963)
- Philip Roth, *Writing About Jews* (1963)
- Susan Sontag, *Notes on “Camp” (1964)*
- Richard Hofstadter, *The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)*
- Paul Goodman, *The Universal Trap (1964)*
- Tom Wolfe, *The Girl of the Year (1964)*
- Edwin Denby, *Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965)*
- N. Scott Momaday, *The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)*
- Gore Vidal, *The Twenty-Ninth Republican Convention (1969)*
- Albert Murray, *The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream (1970)*
- Loren Eiseley, *One Night’s Dying (1970)*
- Edward Hoagland, *Home is Two Places (1970)*
- Joan Didion, *On The Morning After The Sixties (1970)*
February 18, 2022
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an advanced copy of this new historical essay collection.
Essays are very popular in publishing currently. Numerous celebrities, thinkers, doers and wannabes are releasing essay collections all the time. In my career as a bookseller I have seen the shelving expand quite a bit as more and more books about life, reflecting on life, living life and other essays are published. Some are personal, some are reflective, some are trying to cash in those remaining fame points. Some will be forgotten, both fairly and unfairly.
The Golden Age of the American Essay 1945-1970 edited and compiled by famed essayist Philip Lopate spans 25 years from the end of the Second World War and the hopes for a better future to end of the Sixties where people began to know better. The authors included are the usual suspects for essays, Gore Vidal, E. B. White, Norman Mailer et al, with some women Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, with James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King for diversity. I was surprised to see M. Scott Momaday in the collection which was nice to read again.
The introduction by Philip Lopate is interesting, trying to set the idea of the essay and its reflection of the events around politics, art and thought. Some of the essays seem dated, others seem as fresh as the headlines of today. I was disappointed about the lack of commentary on the essays. The authors are given a quick overview, the essay a brief description of other works by the author like it. I understand more analysis of the works would have lead to less works, but still most of these works are very familiar to most readers, a little more information, or a new way of looking at it might have been interesting.
A good collection for students new to essays, to see those that came before, and if further investigation of that author is worth the readers time. Recommended for students interesting in writing, or for podcasters who might want to make their shows more personal or topical. Nothing new, just good solid writing by people reflecting on their time and place, and hope for a better future.
Essays are very popular in publishing currently. Numerous celebrities, thinkers, doers and wannabes are releasing essay collections all the time. In my career as a bookseller I have seen the shelving expand quite a bit as more and more books about life, reflecting on life, living life and other essays are published. Some are personal, some are reflective, some are trying to cash in those remaining fame points. Some will be forgotten, both fairly and unfairly.
The Golden Age of the American Essay 1945-1970 edited and compiled by famed essayist Philip Lopate spans 25 years from the end of the Second World War and the hopes for a better future to end of the Sixties where people began to know better. The authors included are the usual suspects for essays, Gore Vidal, E. B. White, Norman Mailer et al, with some women Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, with James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King for diversity. I was surprised to see M. Scott Momaday in the collection which was nice to read again.
The introduction by Philip Lopate is interesting, trying to set the idea of the essay and its reflection of the events around politics, art and thought. Some of the essays seem dated, others seem as fresh as the headlines of today. I was disappointed about the lack of commentary on the essays. The authors are given a quick overview, the essay a brief description of other works by the author like it. I understand more analysis of the works would have lead to less works, but still most of these works are very familiar to most readers, a little more information, or a new way of looking at it might have been interesting.
A good collection for students new to essays, to see those that came before, and if further investigation of that author is worth the readers time. Recommended for students interesting in writing, or for podcasters who might want to make their shows more personal or topical. Nothing new, just good solid writing by people reflecting on their time and place, and hope for a better future.
December 31, 2025
Another terrific essay compendium assembled by Mr. Lopate, this one focusing on a particular country and period, as the title makes clear. While all the chosen essays are top-notch, there is some inconsistency for the reader, bouncing like a ping-pong ball between styles and topics. To a degree that is inevitable in a work like this, but in my opinion, the editor had done a better job of assembling a cohesive whole in previous works, so I dropped my rating down a star.
Still, this is a great read, the perfect book to pick up every few days over a long period and experience the craft of some terrific writers.
Still, this is a great read, the perfect book to pick up every few days over a long period and experience the craft of some terrific writers.
October 27, 2021
Some essays are dated because they ARE old, but it's a great historical collection of post-War writing if you want to be familiar with the era's notable authors and get a taste of their work.
I discovered the eloquence of James Baldwin. These 38 essays with author descriptions include notables like E.B. White, John Updike, Martin Luther King Jr, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. This is a great reference for all writing students, young and old. @IvyDigest
I discovered the eloquence of James Baldwin. These 38 essays with author descriptions include notables like E.B. White, John Updike, Martin Luther King Jr, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. This is a great reference for all writing students, young and old. @IvyDigest
April 20, 2021
Great writers and plenty of food for thought. I found the introduction interesting and loved the essays.
It's highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
It's highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
January 21, 2022
A collection of American essays written between 1945-1970, sounds thrilling, right? While the collection includes some dense and and/or less engaging (in my opinion) essays, as a whole it serves up some excellent writing as well as a mosaic of America’s challenges and obsessions which defined the post-WW2 era.
Some of the topics touched on by the essays include racism, education, Russia, mass culture and consumerism, and the arts — you know, those challenges of yesteryear that we don’t have to deal with today . . . .
Some of the topics touched on by the essays include racism, education, Russia, mass culture and consumerism, and the arts — you know, those challenges of yesteryear that we don’t have to deal with today . . . .
August 9, 2023
There are some excellent ones, but also some real slogs. A worthy collection, but don't feel compelled to read every one.
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