THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE AMERICAN ESSAY

A celebration of writing on American culture and politics.

Essayist and anthologist Lopate gathers 38 pieces from 1945 to 1970, a period when essay writing flourished and “the figure of the public intellectual, who would be expected to transmit and explain complex ideas, was in ascension.” James Agee, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Elizabeth Hardwick, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Hoagland, and Flannery O’Connor are among the writers included, with many essays relevant to our own times. For example, in “The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy” (1947), Walter Lippmann reminded readers that George Washington “believed that the people should rule. But he did not believe that because the people ruled, there would be freedom, justice, and good government.” Washington realized “that there was no guarantee that the rule of the people would not in its turn be despotic, arbitrary, corrupt, unjust, and unwise.” In 1964, Richard Hofstadter identified “the paranoid style” of politics, characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” and inflamed by mass media: “The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective.” Lopate notes that in the 1960s, the personal essay began to dominate with writers such as Norman Mailer (reflecting on meeting Jacqueline Kennedy), Susan Sontag (elucidating the concept of “Camp, with “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”), and Joan Didion. Lopate has selected both iconic essays (MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”) and lesser known pieces by famous writers: James Baldwin, for one, on visiting a Swiss village, where none of the 600 residents had ever seen a Black man: “there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.” Other contributors include E.B. White, John Updike, Rachel Carson, and N. Scott Momaday.

Well-chosen essays on enduring themes.