Advertisement

Supported by

Books of The Times

‘The Glorious American Essay,’ From Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace

By John Williams

  • Nov. 25, 2020
  • Share full article

glorious american essay

  • Apple Books
  • Barnes and Noble
  • Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

No sane person will read this book the way a reviewer has been conditioned to read books: straight through. And that’s just fine, because “The Glorious American Essay,” though it does contain glories, gets off to a starchy start. The book is organized chronologically, which means it begins with an extended browse through the powdered wig section. Even among dead white men, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Paine are particularly dead and particularly white.

But push through — or save for later — the textbooklike feel of the first 100 pages or so, which also include one of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers; that still leaves about 800 pages of mostly delight and edification to go. This anthology, which presents 100 exemplary essays from colonial times onward, really gets into gear with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience,” from 1844. It’s a remarkably extended fusillade of aphoristic provocation and insight, inspired in part by the death of his son. “There are moods in which we court suffering,” he wrote, “in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.”

Phillip Lopate, the book’s editor, writes in his introduction that the essay form has been valued for the freedom it offers to “explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty.” He quotes Cynthia Ozick judging that “a genuine essay has no educational, polemical or sociopolitical use.” But Lopate isn’t so strict. “Why should a piece of writing,” he asks, “be excluded from the essay kingdom simply because it follows a coherent line of reasoning?” Lopate, especially before he gets to the 20th century, relies heavily on such works of reasoning, pieces of public rhetoric and persuasion, like those by Margaret Fuller, Sarah Moore Grimké and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the standing and treatment of women in America.

For long stretches this book seems intended as a kind of essay-built history of America, as opposed to a history of American essays — though Lopate points out that those histories are naturally intertwined. And naturally echoing. Many of these essays “speak vividly to our present moment,” he writes, about issues that “keep recurring on the national stage.”

It takes no straining to see his point, repeatedly.

“The moral purity of the white woman is deeply contaminated,” Grimké wrote in 1837, because she looks “without horror” upon the crimes committed against her “enslaved sister.”

An essay from 1890 by Sui Sin Far is, as Lopate describes it, a “pioneering effort by a biracial Asian-American woman to examine the enigma of identity, and the conflict between a minority member’s racial pride and her ability to pass, however inadvertently, as part of the white majority.”

Among the most bracing entries is a speech, barely three pages long, given by John Jay Chapman in 1912, in a small Pennsylvania town, one year after a Black man had been murdered by a mob there. No one had been punished for the crime. Chapman rented a hall for the event but delivered his speech, Lopate writes, “to the two people who bothered to show up.” “The whole community, and in a sense our whole people, are really involved in the guilt,” Chapman said. “The failure of the prosecution in this case, in all such cases, is only a proof of the magnitude of the guilt, and of the awful fact that everyone shares in it.” (In one of the anthology’s most pleasing internal rhymes, a long biographical sketch of Chapman by the literary critic Edmund Wilson pops up later.)

Some of the writers mentioned so far are no longer well known, but the great majority of the essays have august bylines: Douglass, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Du Bois, Twain, Wharton, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Sontag, Didion.

Only occasionally do we freshly re-encounter a neglected author like Mary Austin. “Maybe it is not too late to celebrate her,” Lopate writes, “as one of the pioneering American nature writers and environmentalists,” alongside Thoreau and company. (Thoreau is here, of course; as are John James Audubon, Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey, among others.)

Few people are more qualified than Lopate to assemble this lineup. He has written in nearly every form known to humankind but is perhaps most highly acclaimed for his own collections of personal essays and as a curator of top-shelf anthologies, including “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994) and “American Movie Critics” (2006).

Lopate tells us in the introduction that he plans two more volumes in this project: one that will focus on the years 1945-70 and another devoted to works from the 21st century. It’s not exactly clear, then, why this book stretches as far as it does. Two-thirds of its essays predate the end of World War II and, at nearly 600 pages, would make a substantial volume of their own. And only five of its selections are from after 2000. Why not end this book at 1945 and save the later essays for the subsequent volumes?

Then again, those extra years allow Lopate to include Ralph Ellison, Vivian Gornick and David Foster Wallace, to name just three. It’s hard to begrudge him that. What does rankle is his decision to order the essays rigidly by year, which sometimes lends an unguided, survey-like feel to the material. One example will suffice: Right between a terrifically coruscating letter from Frederick Douglass to a man who had enslaved him and Martin R. Delany’s “Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States” (written just four years later) comes a lengthy review-essay about Hawthorne by Melville. While it’s true that readers will hop around in a collection like this anyway, a bit more navigation would have appealed.

But that’s a quibble, which the substance of this book does plenty to silence. Give in to its choral quality for stretches of time, and it’s easy to feel not just the sweep of our centuries but the dialogical nature of our grandest ideas and most persistent struggles — a notion reflected in an essay by Katharine Fullerton Gerould, another writer to whom I was introduced by this book. In 1935, in “An Essay on Essays,” she wrote in favor of nonpolemical work. A good essay, she said, “inevitably sets the reader to thinking,” and “meditation is highly contagious.”

Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt .

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays From Colonial Times to the Present Edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate 906 pages. Pantheon Books. $40.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

The graphic novel series “Aya” explores the pains and pleasures of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood  in West Africa with a modern African woman hero.

Like many Nigerians, the novelist Stephen Buoro has been deeply influenced by the exquisite bedlam of Lagos, a megacity of extremes. Here, he defines the books that make sense of the chaos .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Authors & Events

Recommendations

Join Our Authors for Upcoming Events

  • New & Noteworthy
  • Bestsellers
  • Popular Series
  • The Must-Read Books of 2023
  • Popular Books in Spanish
  • Coming Soon
  • Literary Fiction
  • Mystery & Thriller
  • Science Fiction
  • Spanish Language Fiction
  • Biographies & Memoirs
  • Spanish Language Nonfiction
  • Dark Star Trilogy
  • Ramses the Damned
  • Penguin Classics
  • Award Winners
  • The Parenting Book Guide
  • Books to Read Before Bed
  • Books for Middle Graders
  • Trending Series
  • Magic Tree House
  • The Last Kids on Earth
  • Planet Omar
  • Beloved Characters
  • The World of Eric Carle
  • Llama Llama
  • Junie B. Jones
  • Peter Rabbit
  • Board Books
  • Picture Books
  • Guided Reading Levels
  • Middle Grade
  • Activity Books
  • Trending This Week
  • Top Must-Read Romances
  • Page-Turning Series To Start Now
  • Books to Cope With Anxiety
  • Short Reads
  • Anti-Racist Resources
  • Staff Picks
  • Memoir & Fiction
  • Features & Interviews
  • Emma Brodie Interview
  • James Ellroy Interview
  • Nicola Yoon Interview
  • Qian Julie Wang Interview
  • Deepak Chopra Essay
  • How Can I Get Published?
  • For Book Clubs
  • Reese's Book Club
  • Oprah’s Book Club
  • happy place " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: Happy Place
  • the last white man " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: The Last White Man
  • Authors & Events >
  • Our Authors
  • Michelle Obama
  • Zadie Smith
  • Emily Henry
  • Amor Towles
  • Colson Whitehead
  • In Their Own Words
  • Qian Julie Wang
  • Patrick Radden Keefe
  • Phoebe Robinson
  • Emma Brodie
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Laura Hankin
  • Recommendations >
  • 21 Books To Help You Learn Something New
  • The Books That Inspired "Saltburn"
  • Insightful Therapy Books To Read This Year
  • Historical Fiction With Female Protagonists
  • Best Thrillers of All Time
  • Manga and Graphic Novels
  • happy place " data-category="recommendations" data-location="header">Start Reading Happy Place
  • How to Make Reading a Habit with James Clear
  • Why Reading Is Good for Your Health
  • Vallery Lomas’ Blueberry Buckle Recipe
  • New Releases
  • Memoirs Read by the Author
  • Our Most Soothing Narrators
  • Press Play for Inspiration
  • Audiobooks You Just Can't Pause
  • Listen With the Whole Family

Penguin Random House

Look Inside

The Glorious American Essay

One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

By Phillip Lopate

Category: essays & literary collections | world history.

Oct 19, 2021 | ISBN 9780525436270 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780525436270 --> Buy

Nov 17, 2020 | ISBN 9781524747275 | ISBN 9781524747275 --> Buy

Buy from Other Retailers:

The Glorious American Essay by Phillip Lopate

Oct 19, 2021 | ISBN 9780525436270

Nov 17, 2020 | ISBN 9781524747275

Buy the Ebook:

  • Barnes & Noble
  • Books A Million
  • Google Play Store

About The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate “Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay.

“Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages.”  –Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

Also by Phillip Lopate

The Contemporary American Essay

About Phillip Lopate

PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, and Portrait of My Body. He has also written the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. Lopate is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the Library of America’s Writing… More about Phillip Lopate

Product Details

Category: essays & literary collections | world history, you may also like.

Book cover

The War Against Cliche

Book cover

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Book cover

Collected Letters, 1944-1967

Book cover

Portraits and Observations

Book cover

The Devil Finds Work

Book cover

Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

Book cover

Journal of a Novel

Book cover

The Braindead Megaphone

Book cover

“An endlessly fortifying mixture of famous works and neglected gems that can take pride of place on anyone’s bedside table for months before its pleasures come close to being exhausted.”  — The Wall Street Journal “A treasure trove, a word hoard, a bonanza, perfect for dipping into and rifling through. . . .  Lopate has amassed a heap of marvels. . . .  A superb guide to the nation’s most adventurous and searching forays into prose.” — Los Angeles Review of Books   “Eight hundred pages of mostly delight and edification. . . . Give in to its choral quality and it’s easy to feel not just the sweep of our centuries but the dialogical nature of our grandest ideas and most persistent struggles.”  — The New York Times “An almost embarrassing abundance of riches. . . . Readers of Lopate’s seminal 1994 anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay” will already be familiar with his skill at picking pieces that perfectly offset and interrogate each other. Diving into one of his collections is always a delightful experience.” — C hristian Science Monitor “A feast of American thought, wit, and wisdom.”  — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Phillip Lopate has captured the history of a nation speaking to itself and to the world. Lopate’s rich and expansive understanding of the form has allowed him to uncover the essayistic voice in unexpected places—the sermon, the eulogy, the political treatise. To read The Glorious American Essay is to envision the American experiment itself as a kind of essay, a narrative characterized by trial and error, triumphs and false starts. One comes away from this volume with a renewed sense of the essay’s vitality and its ability to capture the diverse and evolving consciousness of a country.” — Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of Interior States   “In this essential and, I daresay, definitive compendium, Phillip Lopate not only revisits the classics, he offers essays you might not have realized were essays: political speeches, historical documents, the musings of writers who probably had little idea at the time that they were creating lasting art. In doing so, Lopate captures what’s most magical about this form; it’s all around us at eye level—wherever there are words you can probably find an essay—yet the right hands can take it to places you never imagined.” — Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth: Essays  “The essay form models the way we need to live now. We need to think and feel in so many directions, reject easy dogmas, test our beliefs and desires. . . . Once again and right on time, Phillip Lopate offers an indispensable anthology. The Glorious American Essay travels from debate to dreamscape, manifesto to musing, from the struggles of history to the intimacies of the solitary self. Race, gender, science, religion, art, and identity: these quests and conflicts are our legacy as Americans.” —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland   “A sumptuous collection . . . exquisitely curated by one of our finest essayists. An indispensable resource for all of us who love the genre.” —Robert Atwan, series editor of The Best American Essays “The Glorious American Essay  is, quite simply, glorious reading. Lopate has curated a collection of some of the best American essays ever written. . . [T]he book demonstrates the art, the power, the beauty and the cinematic scope of the American essay in its many forms.  Lopate’s introduction is a vital, eye-opening assessment of the potential and the impact of the essay and the ways in which nonfiction can inform, persuade, delight, surprise and, most importantly, enlighten the reader.” —Lee Gutkind, author of My Last Eight Thousand Days   “ The Glorious American Essay situates the essay, an inherently democratic form of art, as the citizen-genre and nothing less than the literary cornerstone of the country. The mongrel nature of the essay is its strength: a mode of adaptability fit for differing, shifting, American ideals. This book could hardly be more timely, relevant, urgent, or necessary.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger “Lopate’s look at three centuries of essays emphasizes how writers have wrestled, explicitly or sub-textually, with America’s national values.” — Publishers Weekly’s TOP 10 new titles in Essays & Literary Criticism      “I can’t think of anyone better suited than Phillip Lopate to put together an anthology like this. It fully deserves to takes its place alongside The Art of the Personal Essay  as an indispensable volume.”  —Geoff Dyer, author of Broadsword Calling Danny Boy “Phillip Lopate is one of the most brilliant and original essayists now working. . . . He has sustained the lively openness of the student who observes and hypothesizes, refusing, admirably, to harden into the judge. . . . He is a master, and also a joy to read.”  —Louise Glück   “Phillip Lopate has earned his place at the center of our literary culture. A superb essayist, he also teaches, edits, [and] bestows order and perspective on this ever diversifying genre. The Glorious American Essay, showcases some of the best of what Whitman in another context called ‘our varied carols.’” —Sven Birkerts , author of The Gutenberg Elegies and The Art of Time in Memoir   “A is a thrilling tour through that most elusive jungle—the American Mind—over the course of nearly 300 years. There could be no better guide than Phillip Lopate. An invaluable anthology. It should be included in the library of anyone who has even a passing interest in American literature.” —Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down Sunshine   “As we struggle to come to grips with where America has come from and where it is heading, I can’t imagine a better guide than Phillip Lopate’s The Glorious American Essay . His selection of incisive essays—from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Marilynne Robinson and Zadie Smith—charts the course of the great and flawed American experiment.  It’s a timely and invaluable anthology.” —James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America “What’s marvelous is the way Lopate’s anthologies—and this new American collection is no exception—manage to be not only comprehensive monuments of deep expertise, but such continuously fresh and thrilling reading companions, right through the biographical notes.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective   “Shaped by Phillip Lopate’s tremendous intellect and curiosity,  The Glorious American Essay is at once monumental and companionable. The American house of prose has more windows and doors than we had imagined, making this anthology not only an education, but a joy. This is a book for the ages.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

Table Of Contents

Introduction 1. Cotton Mather , Of Poetry, and of Style (1726) 2. Jonathan Edwards , Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741) 3. Thomas Paine , Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (1776) 4. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur , On the Situation, Feelings, and Pleasures, of an American Farmer (1782) 5. Benjamin Franklin , Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784) 6. Alexander Hamilton , The Federalist No. 1 (1787) 7. Thomas Jefferson , Religion (1787) 8. Judith Sargent Murray , On the Equality of the Sexes (1790) 9. George Washington , Farewell Address (1796) 10. Washington Irving , The Author’s Account of Himself (1819). 11. John James Audubon , The Passenger Pigeon (1835) 12. Sarah Moore Grimké , On the Condition of Women in the United States (1837) 13. Edgar Allan Poe , The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) 14. Nathaniel Hawthorne , Fire-Worship (1843) 15. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience (1844). 16. Margaret Fuller, from Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) 17. Frederick Douglass , To My Old Master, Thomas Auld (1848) 18. Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850) 19. Martin R. Delany , Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States (1852) 20. Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (1854) 21. Oliver Wendell Holmes , from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) 22. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865) 23. Fanny Fern , “Delightful Men” (1870) 24. Walt Whitman , Death of Abraham Lincoln (1879) 25. Henry James , The Art of Fiction (1884) 26. Charlotte Perkins Gilman , On Advertising for Marriage (1885) 27. Sui Sin Far , Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1890) 28. Jane Addams , The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (1892) 29. Elizabeth Cady Stanton , The Solitude of Self (1892) 30. John Muir , A Wind-Storm in the Forests (1894) 31. Stephen Crane , The Mexican Lower Classes (1895) 32. William Dean Howells , The Country Printer (1896) 33. John Burroughs , The Art of Seeing Things (1899) 34. William James , What Makes a Life Significant? (1900) 35. W. E. B. Du Bois , Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903) 36. John Dewey , Democracy in Education (1903) 37. Mary Austin , The Basket Maker (1903) 38. Mark Twain , The Turning Point of My Life (1910) 39. Randolph Bourne , The Handicapped (1911) 40. John Jay Chapman , Coatesville (1912) 41. Agnes Repplier , The Grocer’s Cat (1912) 42. George Santayana , The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1913) 43. Edith Wharton, America at War (1918) 44. Robert Cortes Holliday , An Article Without an Idea (1919) 45. Dorothy Parker, Good Souls (1919) 46. Finley Peter Dunne , The Prohibition Era (1920) 47. Willa Cather, 148 Charles Street (1922) 48. Theodore Dreiser, The City of My Dreams (1923) 49. Christopher Morley , Intellectuals and Roughnecks (1923) 50. H. L. Mencken , The Hills of Zion (1925) 51. James Weldon Johnson, The Dilemma of the Negro Author (1928) 52. Zora Neale Hurston , How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) 53. James Thurber, The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism (1929) 54. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (1931) 55. Kenneth Burke , The Status of Art (1931) 56. F. Scott Fitzgerald , My Lost City (1932) 57. Emma Goldman , Was My Life Worth Living? (1934) 58. Katharine Fullerton Gerould , An Essay on Essays (1935) 59. Gertrude Stein, What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them? (1936) 60. M. F. K. Fisher , Meals for Me (1937) 61. Lewis Mumford , A New York Adolescence (1937) 62. Edmund Wilson , John Jay Chapman (1938) 63. William Saroyan , Fragments (1938) 64. Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) 65. Eudora Welty , Ida M’Toy (1942) 66. Hannah Arendt , We Refugees (1943) 67. Mary McCarthy, America the Beautiful (1947) 68. E. B. White, Death of a Pig (1947) 69. James Baldwin , Equal in Paris (1955) 70. Norman Mailer, The Homosexual Villain (1955) 71. Rachel Carson, The Marginal World (1955) 72. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Stranger’s Path (1957) 73. Paul Tillich , Invocation: The Lost Dimension in Religion (1958) 74. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1964) 75. Joan Didion , Notes from a Native Daughter (1965) 76. Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam (1967) 77. Ralph Ellison , What America Would Be Like Without Blacks (1970) 78. Loren Eiseley , The Brown Wasps (1971) 79. Nora Ephron , A Few Words About Breasts (1972) 80. Lewis Thomas , The Lives of a Cell (1974) 81. Annie Dillard , On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley (1974) 82. Adrienne Rich , Women and Honor (1975) 83. Elizabeth Hardwick, Billie Holiday (1976) 84. Edward Abbey , The Great American Desert (1977) 85. William H. Gass , On Talking to Oneself (1979) 86. Wallace Stegner, The Twilight of Self-Reliance (1980) 87. Cynthia Ozick , A Drugstore in Winter (1982) 88. Audre Lorde , The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1983) 89. Rolando Hinojosa , This Writer’s Sense of Place (1983) 90. Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple (1986) 91. Guy Davenport, On Reading (1987) 92. N. Scott Momaday , The Native Voice in American Literature (1988) 93. Marilynne Robinson , Puritans and Prigs (1994) 94. Jamaica Kincaid, In History (1997) 95. Vivian Gornick, The Princess and the Pea (1997) 96. David Foster Wallace , The View from Mrs. Thompson’s (2001) 97. Richard Rodriguez, Hispanic (2002) 98. Wayne Koestenbaum , My 1980s (2003) 99. Leonard Michaels , My Yiddish (2003) 100. Zadie Smith , Speaking in Tongues (2008)

Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

Raise kids who love to read

Today's Top Books

Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

An online magazine for today’s home cook

Stay in Touch

By clicking "Sign Up", I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy . You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime.

Just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Profile Picture

  • ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

avatar

THE GLORIOUS AMERICAN ESSAY

One hundred essays from colonial times to the present.

edited by Phillip Lopate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

A thoughtfully edited volume that reflects America’s changing social, political, and cultural life.

Four centuries of essays testify to the richness of the form.

In the first of a projected three volumes of collected essays, Lopate offers what he justifiably calls “a smorgasbord of treats, a place to begin to sample the endless riches of the American essay”: 100 essays from the 18th to the 21st centuries, from Cotton Mather to Zadie Smith. Volume 2, The Golden Age of the American Essay , will focus on the years 1945-2000, and Volume 3 will be dedicated to pieces from the 21st century. Many writers included here are likely to be familiar to readers but perhaps not to the students for whom this collection seems aimed, with its informative introduction, succinct headnotes, and contents organized by both theme and form. George Washington is represented by his Farewell Address; Emerson, by “Experience”; Margaret Fuller, by an excerpt from Woman in the Nineteenth Century . Thoreau rings in, predictably, with “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”; Henry James, with “The Art of Fiction”; Jane Addams, with a piece on settlement houses; William James, with “What Makes a Life Significant?” Some essays—such as Dorothy Parker’s musings on people notable for their goodness and James Thurber’s on men’s idealizing of women—seem dusty, if not dated, although Fanny Fern’s dryly satirical “Delightful Men,” from 1870, has lost none of its bite. Essays that consider race, ethnicity, disability, social justice, and sexual orientation make the collection timely. In “The Homosexual Villain,” written for a gay magazine in 1955, Norman Mailer candidly reveals the experiences and readings that transformed his bias against gay men. “My God, homosexuals are people too,” he realized suddenly. Among the many other notable contributors are Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, M.F.K. Fisher, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4726-8

Page Count: 928

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL NONFICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Phillip Lopate

A YEAR AND A DAY

BOOK REVIEW

by Phillip Lopate

THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ESSAY

edited by Phillip Lopate

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE AMERICAN ESSAY

Awards & Accolades

Readers Vote

Our Verdict

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

More by David Grann

THE <i>WAGER</i>

by David Grann

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

More About This Book

Brendan Fraser Joins Cast of ‘Flower Moon’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A cartoon collection.

by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.

Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker . So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny .” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.

ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

More by Steve Martin

NUMBER ONE IS WALKING

by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss

AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY

by Steve Martin

LATE FOR SCHOOL

by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne

Martin &amp; Bliss: A Unique Comic Collaboration

PERSPECTIVES

  • Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
  • News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
  • Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
  • Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
  • Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
  • More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
  • About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Go To Top

Popular in this Genre

Close Quickview

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Sign in with Google

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

  • Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

glorious american essay

  • Shopping Cart

Advanced Search

  • Browse Our Shelves
  • Best Sellers
  • Digital Audiobooks
  • Featured Titles
  • New This Week
  • Staff Recommended
  • Suggestions for Kids
  • Fiction Suggestions
  • Nonfiction Suggestions
  • Reading Lists
  • Upcoming Events
  • Ticketed Events
  • Science Book Talks
  • Past Events
  • Video Archive
  • Online Gift Codes
  • University Clothing
  • Goods & Gifts from Harvard Book Store
  • Hours & Directions
  • Newsletter Archive
  • Frequent Buyer Program
  • Signed First Edition Club
  • Signed New Voices in Fiction Club
  • Harvard Square Book Circle
  • Off-Site Book Sales
  • Corporate & Special Sales
  • Print on Demand

Harvard Book Store

  • All Our Shelves
  • Academic New Arrivals
  • New Hardcover - Biography
  • New Hardcover - Fiction
  • New Hardcover - Nonfiction
  • New Titles - Paperback
  • African American Studies
  • Anthologies
  • Anthropology / Archaeology
  • Architecture
  • Asia & The Pacific
  • Astronomy / Geology
  • Boston / Cambridge / New England
  • Business & Management
  • Career Guides
  • Child Care / Childbirth / Adoption
  • Children's Board Books
  • Children's Picture Books
  • Children's Activity Books
  • Children's Beginning Readers
  • Children's Middle Grade
  • Children's Gift Books
  • Children's Nonfiction
  • Children's/Teen Graphic Novels
  • Teen Nonfiction
  • Young Adult
  • Classical Studies
  • Cognitive Science / Linguistics
  • College Guides
  • Cultural & Critical Theory
  • Education - Higher Ed
  • Environment / Sustainablity
  • European History
  • Exam Preps / Outlines
  • Games & Hobbies
  • Gender Studies / Gay & Lesbian
  • Gift / Seasonal Books
  • Globalization
  • Graphic Novels
  • Hardcover Classics
  • Health / Fitness / Med Ref
  • Islamic Studies
  • Large Print
  • Latin America / Caribbean
  • Law & Legal Issues
  • Literary Crit & Biography
  • Local Economy
  • Mathematics
  • Media Studies
  • Middle East
  • Myths / Tales / Legends
  • Native American
  • Paperback Favorites
  • Performing Arts / Acting
  • Personal Finance
  • Personal Growth
  • Photography
  • Physics / Chemistry
  • Poetry Criticism
  • Ref / English Lang Dict & Thes
  • Ref / Foreign Lang Dict / Phrase
  • Reference - General
  • Religion - Christianity
  • Religion - Comparative
  • Religion - Eastern
  • Romance & Erotica
  • Science Fiction
  • Short Introductions
  • Technology, Culture & Media
  • Theology / Religious Studies
  • Travel Atlases & Maps
  • Travel Lit / Adventure
  • Urban Studies
  • Wines And Spirits
  • Women's Studies
  • World History
  • Writing Style And Publishing

Add to Cart

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values, but even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

There are no customer reviews for this item yet.

Classic Totes

glorious american essay

Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more!

Shipping & Pickup

glorious american essay

We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail!

Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club!

glorious american essay

Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly.

Harvard Book Store

Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore

© 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved

Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected]

View our current hours »

Join our bookselling team »

We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily.

Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm

Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual.

Map Find Harvard Book Store »

Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy »

Harvard University harvard.edu »

Facebook

  • Clubs & Services

glorious american essay

Celebrate Black History Month with 100 Essential Books from the Past Decade

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

Phillip lopate.

928 pages, Hardcover

Published November 17, 2020

About the author

Profile Image for Phillip Lopate.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

Profile Image for Brian Eshleman.

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

Your subscription makes our work possible.

We want to bridge divides to reach everyone.

globe

Get stories that empower and uplift daily.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads .

Select free newsletters:

A selection of the most viewed stories this week on the Monitor's website.

Every Saturday

Hear about special editorial projects, new product information, and upcoming events.

Select stories from the Monitor that empower and uplift.

Every Weekday

An update on major political events, candidates, and parties twice a week.

Twice a Week

Stay informed about the latest scientific discoveries & breakthroughs.

Every Tuesday

A weekly digest of Monitor views and insightful commentary on major events.

Every Thursday

Latest book reviews, author interviews, and reading trends.

Every Friday

A weekly update on music, movies, cultural trends, and education solutions.

The three most recent Christian Science articles with a spiritual perspective.

Every Monday

Pushing the bounds of form in ‘The Glorious American Essay’

Phillip Lopate's choices for this fine anthology may stretch the parameters of an essay, but he's made distinctive and evocative selections. 

stack of books

  • By Steve Donoghue Correspondent

December 23, 2020

When it comes to essay anthologies, there’s a tradition so iron-clad and long-standing that it’s remarkably daring of editor Phillip Lopate, in the foreword of “The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present,” to natter for 16 whole pages before he gets around to asking “But wait: what is an essay?”

This question is practically constitutionally required when writing about essays. In a narrative tradition going all the way back through Montaigne to Plutarch, editors, publishers, and a whole miscellany of intellectuals have automatically raised Deep Existential Questions in their introductions. The essay form has so many fundamental identity problems you’d expect it to wear Goth eyeliner and moodily refuse to leave its room for family meals.

Given all this confusion, surely it’s long since time to settle the question. So, for the record: an essay is a literary set of ruminations that can be read in one sitting. See? Easy-peasy. It’s Samuel Johnson’s “loose sally of mind” with just a few common-sense parameters.

“Literary” – written to be read rather than declaimed – is a key word here. Therefore Lopate’s decision to include explicitly nonliterary works such as speeches (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s magnificent 1892 speech “The Solitude of Self,” for instance, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s rousing “Beyond Vietnam” from 1967) does, strictly speaking, cross his own parameters.

Another crucial word in this definition is “ruminations.” Something excessively structured or programmatic should also be out-of-bounds. Yet “The Glorious American Essay” includes very methodical efforts like Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist No. 1” or “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” a paper presented by Jane Addams in 1892.

Same goes for “in one sitting,” which should have overruled Lopate’s decision to include excerpts from longer works like “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. or “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” by Margaret Fuller. Worthy as these passages are, they weren’t conceived as stand-alone essays, so they shouldn’t be taking up space that could have gone to things that were.

But Lopate admits that he broadened his admission standards for “The Glorious American Essay” to include “every type of the beast,” and that makes it invariably fascinating reading. Even if readers only pay attention to entries that align with the aforementioned definition, there’s an almost embarrassing abundance of riches in these 900-plus pages. Readers of Lopate’s seminal 1994 anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay” will already be familiar with his skill at picking pieces that perfectly offset and interrogate each other. Diving into one of his collections is always a delightful experience that involves encountering even the most familiar selections as if for the first time.

Inevitably for such a collection, there’s a bit of Emerson’s quasi-mystical flapdoodle, this time the essay “Experience” (“I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, ... old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert,” etc.). There’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” by W.E.B. Du Bois, with his call for decency for the Black American: “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Wonderfully, there’s Audre Lorde’s electrifying “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” (technically a lecture, but we’re playing by Lopate’s loose rules here) and also poor forgotten Theodore Dreiser’s brief, passionate hymn of praise to New York, “The City of My Dreams” (“A May or June moon will be hanging like a burnished silver disc between the high walls aloft”). Like so many essay anthology editors before him, Lopate includes here the 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the single most demented piece of writing ever produced on this continent.

Back in 2016 editor John D'Agata likewise included “Sinners in the Hands of the Angry God” in his anthology “The Making of the American Essay,” which was the concluding volume in a trilogy of essay anthologies designed both to chart the essay’s development and to push its boundaries. And even though he calls editing an anthology “a chump’s game,” Lopate intends “The Glorious American Essay” to be the first installment in another essay trilogy. So there’ll be plenty more room for beasts of all kinds, thankfully.

Help fund Monitor journalism for $11/ month

Already a subscriber? Login

Mark Sappenfield illustration

Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

Our work isn't possible without your support.

Unlimited digital access $11/month.

Monitor Daily

Digital subscription includes:

  • Unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
  • CSMonitor.com archive.
  • The Monitor Daily email.
  • No advertising.
  • Cancel anytime.

glorious american essay

Related stories

Review humorist david sedaris delivers his choicest material in ‘the best of me’, review barbara kingsolver’s poems gently mock how-to books, review native american poetry anthology vibrates with powerful voices, share this article.

Link copied.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

Subscription expired

Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription.

Return to the free version of the site

If you have questions about your account, please contact customer service or call us at 1-617-450-2300 .

This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out.

Session expired

Your session to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. We logged you out.

No subscription

You don’t have a Christian Science Monitor subscription yet.

  • Winter Reads to Keep You Warm
  • Soups, Stews, and Comfort Foods
  • Newly Added eBooks
  • Featured: Available Now eBooks
  • Our Once and Future World
  • A Garden of Stories
  • ALWAYS AVAILABLE
  • Newly Added Audiobooks
  • Listen Together
  • It's a Mystery!
  • Awesome Audiobooks for Teens
  • The Stars are Aligned!
  • Kindle Books
  • Always Available

Title details for The Glorious American Essay by Phillip Lopate - Wait list

The Glorious American Essay

Description.

"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages."  —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

Expand title description text

Kindle Book

  • Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781524747275
  • File size: 6955 KB

Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook

History Literary Criticism Nonfiction

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9781524747275 Release date: November 17, 2020

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9781524747275 File size: 6955 KB Release date: November 17, 2020

  • Phillip Lopate - Author
  • Formats Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook
  • Languages English

Why is availability limited?

Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.

The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:

Read-along ebook.

The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.

Recommendation limit reached

You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase.

Session expired

Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages.

If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.

Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list.

Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection.

The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help.

  • Search for:

In Non-Fiction

The Glorious American Essay

glorious american essay

Essay-writing has a rich history in the United States. What American essays should we remember today, and why? What contributions do they make to America’s collective memory? The Mount invited Phillip Lopate to discuss his recent edited collection, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to Present , and the addition of Edith Wharton’s lecture titled America at War (1918). In conversation with journalist Julie Scelfo , Lopate explores the complexities of choosing works, past and present, for this anthology.

glorious american essay

  • Kindle Store
  • Kindle eBooks
  • Literature & Fiction

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

  • Select quantity
  • Buy and send eBooks
  • Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

glorious american essay

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Image Unavailable

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

  • To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Phillip Lopate

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present Kindle Edition

iphone with kindle app

  • Book Description
  • Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

  • Print length 884 pages
  • Language English
  • Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
  • Publisher Anchor
  • Publication date November 17, 2020
  • File size 7374 KB
  • Page Flip Enabled
  • Word Wise Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting Enabled
  • See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

The Contemporary American Essay

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0852P9Y34
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (November 17, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 17, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 7374 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 884 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1524747262
  • #18 in Historical Essays (Kindle Store)
  • #57 in Historical Essays (Books)
  • #223 in Essays (Kindle Store)

About the author

glorious american essay

Phillip Lopate

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

  • Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

glorious american essay

Top reviews from other countries

  • Amazon Newsletter
  • About Amazon
  • Accessibility
  • Sustainability
  • Press Center
  • Investor Relations
  • Amazon Devices
  • Amazon Science
  • Start Selling with Amazon
  • Sell apps on Amazon
  • Supply to Amazon
  • Protect & Build Your Brand
  • Become an Affiliate
  • Become a Delivery Driver
  • Start a Package Delivery Business
  • Advertise Your Products
  • Self-Publish with Us
  • Host an Amazon Hub
  • › See More Ways to Make Money
  • Amazon Visa
  • Amazon Store Card
  • Amazon Secured Card
  • Amazon Business Card
  • Shop with Points
  • Credit Card Marketplace
  • Reload Your Balance
  • Amazon Currency Converter
  • Your Account
  • Your Orders
  • Shipping Rates & Policies
  • Amazon Prime
  • Returns & Replacements
  • Manage Your Content and Devices
  • Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
  • Conditions of Use
  • Privacy Notice
  • Your Ads Privacy Choices
  • Find a Library
  • Browse Collections
  • The Glorious American Essay

ebook ∣ One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

By phillip lopate.

cover image of The Glorious American Essay

Add Book To Favorites

Is this your library?

Sign up to save your library.

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

9781524747268

Phillip Lopate

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

17 November 2020

Facebook logo

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

LibbyDevices.png

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:.

LinkedIn

Celebrating a favorite writing form in ‘The Glorious American Essay’

It’s hard to read Phillip Lopate’s “ The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present ” without recalling John D’Agata’s three-volume “A New History of the Essay,” published between 2003 and 2016. D’Agata intended his books to be provocative, appropriating material from other territories and blurring lines with abandon, reframing Twain and Blake and Melville to fit his thesis. If it’s tempting to consider Lopate’s book, the first in another projected trilogy, as more tailored, he refuses to be so easily categorized. “Many have tried to limit the field,” he notes in his introduction. “… So, for this anthology, I have taken the position of opening it to every type of the beast: the familiar essay, the personal essay, the critical essay, the biographical essay, the dialogue-essay, the humor essay, the philosophical essay, the academic, and the polemic.” That means, among other elements, speeches, letters, sermons, journalism. More to the point, it enables Lopate to connect the essay to American public life. He opens the collection with Cotton Mather, then gathers work by Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Tillich, and Adrienne Rich. If, in contemporary culture, we tend to regard the essay as inherently personal, Lopate reminds us that it has been, and remains, a mechanism of social and political expression, as well.

This is most apparent in the anthology’s early pages, which reflect the origins of American life — often with pointed relevance for today. “Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless,” Jefferson warns in “Religion,” taken from his “ Notes on the State of Virginia .” “A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men may be his victims.” Although the danger to which he refers is religious, experience requires that we read it through a broader lens. Something similar is true of Martin R. Delany’s “Comparative Conditions of the Colored People of the United States,” first published in his 1852 book “ The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People in the United States ”; here, the author, considered to be “the father of African nationalism,” makes a strikingly modern argument about the roots and effects of racism that includes scorn for white anti-slavery activists who put blacks in subservient positions when they hire them at all.

Advertisement

Lopate is attempting to ground an argument for a kind of intellectual or narrative continuity to our collective history, to trace overlapping lineages of thought. Delany, then, presages Zora Neale Huston or James Baldwin or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Audre Lorde. “What does it mean,” the latter asks in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1983), “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.” That such a question is as relevant to us as it was to her or to Delany is entirely the point. The more things change, in other words, the more things never change.

And yet, part of what “The Glorious American Essay” wants to tell us is that we do change, or at least evolve in certain ways. Early considerations of America’s nascent statehood yield to Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in turn yield to more lyrical observations, or reflections of daily affairs. In “The Basket Maker,” Mary Austin presents a precise and empathetic portrait of a Paiute artisan at the turn of the 20th century; the piece comes from her magnificent, and under-appreciated, set of Mojave Desert observations, “ The Land of Little Rain ” (1903). “[I]f they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare,” she observes, “there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire.” Vernacular history, in other words, which is also what the essay offers, a set of impressions that might be otherwise overlooked. One of the finest examples is Agnes Repplier’s “The Grocer’s Cat,” first published in 1912. “For the cat’s domesticity,” Repplier reminds us, “is at best only a presumption. It is one of life’s ironical adjustments that the creature who fits so harmoniously into the family group should be alien to its influences, and independent of its cramping conditions.”

As it happens, I hadn’t read Repplier before; to encounter her was a discovery. I wish there were more discoveries, however, in “The Glorious American Essay,” although I understand that’s not the point. “Many of the choices here are no-brainers,” Lopate acknowledges. I can’t really argue with the presence of any essay here. As an essayist, I admire them. As a teacher, I am already thinking about which ones to assign. And I am looking forward to volumes two and three, which focus, respectively, on the postwar years and the present day, two periods of creative foment in the essay.

At the same time, I would have welcomed a few more iconoclastic selections because the essay is a vehicle of iconoclasm. It rewards the idler, the contemplative, the self-creator, the one who stands apart. Nancy Mairs, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Sui Sin Far, and Repplier herself — these are some of the voices Lopate includes who represent that tradition, which remains essential to the American voice. “This is the most intimate of forms,” Katharine Fullerton Gerould writes in “An Essay on Essays,” “because it permits you to see a mind at work.” A mind at work, yes. Or a hundred minds. Or maybe even all 331 million of our minds, each contributing to an elaborate tapestry that, like the map once imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, cannot help but be as vast and sprawling as the country itself.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of a dozen books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

THE GLORIOUS AMERICAN ESSAY: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

Edited and with an Introduction by Phillip Lopate

Pantheon, 928 pages, $40

Iowa City Public Library Catalog

The glorious American essay One hundred essays from colonial times to the present

Book - 2020

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon and Thoreau and John Muir to Rachel Carson and An ... nie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns, dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, and famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay"-- more

2nd Floor Show me where

Description.

  • Cotton Mather, Of Poetry and Style (1726)
  • Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)
  • Thomas Paine, Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (1776)
  • Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, On the Situation, Feelings, and Thought of an American Farmer (1782)
  • Benjamin Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784)
  • Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 1 (1787)
  • Thomas Jefferson, Religion (1787)
  • Judith Sargent Murray, On the Equality of the Sexes (1790)
  • George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
  • Washington Irving, The Author's Account of Himself (1819)
  • John James Audubon, The Passenger Pigeon (1835)
  • Sarah Moore Grimke, On the Condition of Women in the United States (1837)
  • Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Furniture (1840)
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fire-Worship (1843)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience (1844)
  • Margaret Fuller, from Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
  • Frederick Douglass, To My Old Master, Thomas Auld (1848)
  • Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
  • Martin R. Delany, Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States (1852)
  • Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (1854)
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
  • Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
  • Fanny Fern, Delightful Men (1870)
  • Walt Whitman, Death of Abraham Lincoln (1879)
  • Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884)
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, On Advertising for Marriage (1885)
  • Sui Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1890)
  • Jane Addams, The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (1892)
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Solitude of Self (1892)
  • John Muir, A Wind-Storm in the Forests (1894)
  • Stephen Crane, The Mexican Lower Classes (1895)
  • William Dean Howells, The Country Printer (1896)
  • John Burroughs, The Art of Seeing Things (1899)
  • William James, What Makes a Life Significant? (1900)
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903)
  • John Dewey, Democracy in Education (1903)
  • Mary Austin, The Basket Maker (1903)
  • Mark Twain, The Turning Point of My Life (1910)
  • Randolph Bourne, The Handicapped (1911)
  • John Jay Chapman, Coatesville (1912)
  • Agnes Repplier, The Grocer's Cat (1912)
  • George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1913)
  • R. C. Holliday, An Article Without an Idea (1919)
  • Dorothy Parker, Good Souls (1919)
  • Finley Peter Dunne, The Prohibition Era (1920)
  • Willa Cather, 148 Charles Street (1922)
  • Theodore Dreiser, The City of My Dreams (1923)
  • Christopher Morley, Intellectuals and Roughnecks (1923)
  • H. L. Mencken, The Hills of Zion (1925)
  • James Weldon Johnson, The Dilemma of the Negro Author (1928)
  • Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to be Colored Me (1928)
  • James Thurber, The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism (1929)
  • Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (1931)
  • Kenneth Burke, The Status of Art (1931)
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City (1932)
  • Emma Goldman, Was My Life Worth Living? (1934)
  • Katharine Fullerton Gerould, An Essay on Essays (1935)
  • M. F. K. Fisher, Meals for Me (1937)
  • Lewis Mumford, A New York Adolescence (1937)
  • Edmund Wilson, John Jay Chapman (1938)
  • William Saroyan, Fragments (1938)
  • Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)
  • Gertrude Stein, What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There so Few of Them? (1940)
  • M.F.K. Fisher, Meals for Me (1937)
  • William Saroyan, From Seven Fragments (1938)
  • Clement Greenburg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)
  • Eudora Welty, Ida M'Toy (1942)
  • Hannah Arendt, We Refugees (1943)
  • Mary McCarthy, America the Beautiful (1947)
  • E. B. White, Death of a Pig (1947)
  • James Baldwin, Equal in Paris (1955)
  • Norman Mailer, The Homosexual Villain (1955)
  • Rachel Carson, The Marginal World (1955)
  • John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Stranger's Path (1957)
  • Paul Tillich, The Lost Dimension in Religion (1958)
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1964)
  • Joan Didion, Notes of a Native Daughter (1965)
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam (1967)
  • Ralph Ellison, What America Would Be Like Without Blacks (1970)
  • Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps (1971)
  • Nora Ephron, A Few Words About Breasts (1972)
  • Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974)
  • Annie Dillard, On Foot in Virginia's Roanoke Valley (1974)
  • Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor; Some Notes on Lying (1975)
  • Elizabeth Hardwick, Billie Holiday (1976)
  • Edward Abbey, The Great American Desert (1977)
  • William H. Gass, On Talking to Oneself (1979)
  • Wallace Stegner, The Twilight of Self-Reliance (1980)
  • Cynthia Ozick, A Drugstore in Winter (1982)
  • Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (1983)
  • Rolando Hinojosa, This Writer's Sense of Place (1983)
  • Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple (1986)
  • Guy Davenport, On Reading (1987)
  • N. Scott Momaday, The Native American Voice in American Literature (1988)
  • Marilynne Robinson, Puritans and Prigs (1994)
  • Jamaica Kincaid, In History (1997)
  • Vivian Gornick, The Princess and the Pea (1997)
  • David Foster Wallace, The View from Mrs. Thompson's (2001)
  • Richard Rodriguez, Hispanic (2002)
  • Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s (2003)
  • Leonard Michaels, My Yiddish (2003)
  • Zadie Smith, Speaking in Tongues (2008).

Lopate, writer and professor, staked his ground a quarter-of-century ago as an ardent and expert advocate for the essay in the cherished global anthology The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. In this dynamically curated collection, he celebrates the versatility and significance of the "glorious American essay." A chronological table of contents is followed by a thematic list organizing the 100 spectacularly varied and powerful works into such categories as "Feminism and Gender" (Margaret Fuller, Audre Lorde), "Race and Ethnicity" (Ralph Ellison, Richard Rodriguez), and "Landscape and Sense of Place" (Mary Austin, Annie Dillard), as well as a list by form (biographical, critical, humorous, memoir). Expected writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin) are matched by those who will be new to readers, including the clarion and pioneering women essayists Judith Sargent Murray and Sui Sin Far. With reflection, dissent, wit, poignancy, and finesse at every turn, this vibrant and illuminating pairing of social and literary histories is a vital resource. In two forthcoming volumes, Lopate will deepen coverage of the postwar era and the twenty-first century.

Prolific anthologist Lopate (The Art of the Personal Essay) returns to present a collection of American essays spanning Colonial times to the present, covering themes of aesthetics and philosophy, religion, landscape, love and sexuality, and feminism, among others. This anthology uniquely tells the story of America as well as the essay. Arranged by form (e.g., "sermons," "speeches and lectures," "nature and science writing," "polemics"), it includes headnotes for each piece, as well as an informative introduction. Essayists both well known (e.g., Tom Paine, George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith) sit alongside less-famous writers (e.g., St. John Crevecoeur, Fanny Fern, Sui Sin Far, and Randolph Bourne). Women and minority groups are well represented, ensuring a comprehensive selection. Lopate further addresses readers' queries as to why specific writers (Gore Vidal, Philip Roth) are not present. VERDICT Two forthcoming collections is this series focusing on the postwar era (1945--2000) and essays of the 21st century will ensure this is the most comprehensive set of American essay writing to date. For readers fascinated by the sheer scope, variety, and art of the essay.--Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn

Four centuries of essays testify to the richness of the form. In the first of a projected three volumes of collected essays, Lopate offers what he justifiably calls "a smorgasbord of treats, a place to begin to sample the endless riches of the American essay": 100 essays from the 18th to the 21st centuries, from Cotton Mather to Zadie Smith. Volume 2, The Golden Age of the American Essay, will focus on the years 1945-2000, and Volume 3 will be dedicated to pieces from the 21st century. Many writers included here are likely to be familiar to readers but perhaps not to the students for whom this collection seems aimed, with its informative introduction, succinct headnotes, and contents organized by both theme and form. George Washington is represented by his Farewell Address; Emerson, by "Experience"; Margaret Fuller, by an excerpt from Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Thoreau rings in, predictably, with "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"; Henry James, with "The Art of Fiction"; Jane Addams, with a piece on settlement houses; William James, with "What Makes a Life Significant?" Some essays--such as Dorothy Parker's musings on people notable for their goodness and James Thurber's on men's idealizing of women--seem dusty, if not dated, although Fanny Fern's dryly satirical "Delightful Men," from 1870, has lost none of its bite. Essays that consider race, ethnicity, disability, social justice, and sexual orientation make the collection timely. In "The Homosexual Villain," written for a gay magazine in 1955, Norman Mailer candidly reveals the experiences and readings that transformed his bias against gay men. "My God, homosexuals are people too," he realized suddenly. Among the many other notable contributors are Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, M.F.K. Fisher, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and Jamaica Kincaid.. A thoughtfully edited volume that reflects America's changing social, political, and cultural life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

INTRODUCTION I The essay is a literary form dating back to ancient times, with a long and glorious history. As the record par excellence of a mind tracking its thoughts, it can be considered the intellectual bellwether of any modern society. The great promise of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one's readers and literary forebears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling literary style. Flexible, shape-shifting, experimental, as befits its name derived from the French ( essai = "attempt"), it is nothing if not versatile. In the United States, the essay has had a particularly illustrious if underexamined career. In fact, it is possible to see the dual histories of the country and the literary form as running on parallel tracks, the essay mulling current issues and thereby reflecting the story of the United States in each succeeding period. And just as American democracy has been an ongoing experiment, with no guarantees of perfection, so has the essay been, as William Dean Howells argued, an innately democratic form inviting all comers to say their piece, however imperfectly. The Puritans, some of our earliest settlers, chose the essay over fiction and poetry as their preferred mode of expression. In both sermons and texts explicitly labeled "essays," men like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards articulated their religious and ethical values. Many later American commentators would take them to task for being sexually prudish, intolerant, and repressive. H. L. Mencken, in a scathing extended essay entitled "Puritanism as a Literary Force," blamed that heritage for holding back American literature by overstressing behavioral proprieties while understressing aesthetics. Edmund Wilson wittily noted that Mencken himself was something of a Puritan. The bohemian wing of American literature, from Walt Whitman to the present, has engaged in protracted guerrilla warfare with Puritanism and offered itself as an alternative. On the other hand, Marilynne Robinson defends the Puritans from what she regards as a caricature of their positions. Say what you will about their rigid morality: these Puritan thinkers were highly learned, with sophisticated prose styles, and we are fortunate in having them set so high an intellectual standard for later American essayists to follow. Skip ahead to the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, all of whom seem to have been superb writers. In their treatises, pamphlets, speeches, letters, and broadsides, they tested their tentative views on politics and governance, hoping to move from conviction to certainty. Theirs was a self-conscious rhetoric influenced by the French Enlightenment authors and the orators of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the polished eighteenth-century nonfiction prose writers of their opponent, Great Britain. In the decades following independence, United States authors labored to free themselves from subservience to English parental literary influence and to establish a national culture that would sound somehow unmistakably American. Washington Irving, perhaps the first freelance American author to support himself by his pen, was ridiculed by British critics such as William Hazlitt for imitating the English periodical essayists. He, in turn, wrote an essay entitled "English Writers in America," which began: "It is with feelings of deep regret that I observe the literary animosity daily growing up between England and America." He went on to analyze the condescending travel accounts of English authors in America, which were then all the rage in Great Britain: "That such men should give prejudiced accounts of America is not a matter of surprize. The themes it offers for contemplation are too vast and elevated for their capacities. The national character is yet in a state of fermentation: it may have its frothings and sediment, but its ingredients are sound and wholesome; it has already given proofs of powerful and generous qualities, and the whole promises to settle down into something substantially excellent." Edgar Allan Poe bristled at the canard that Americans were too materialistic and engineering-minded to produce literature: "Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make rail-roads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse. . . . But this is the purest insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him . . . nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors." But it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, our greatest nineteenth-century essayist, who sounded the alarm most famously in his speech "The American Scholar." Acknowledging that up to then the Americans were "a people too busy to give to letters more," he nevertheless prophesied that the time was coming "when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests." He concluded by saying: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds." It's worthwhile remembering that this author who called for independence from foreign culture was probably the best-read person of his time and had imbibed not only most of British, French, and German literature but Eastern religious classics as well. Emerson developed a kind of essay that was quirky, densely complex, speculative, digressive, and epigrammatic. He was part of that extraordinary flowering of literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century, the so-called American Renaissance, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson. By the time it had run its course, there was no longer any doubt that America had itself a national culture. But there was more at stake than just the development of literary talent. The nation was facing enormous political and moral challenges from the twin oppressions of blacks and women. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which called for runaway slaves to be captured by northerners and returned as property to their southern slave owners, converted many of these writers to the abolitionist cause. Some of the most eloquent essays attacking slavery were penned by African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany. They engendered an essayistic discourse on race that would be taken up by a distinguished lineage of black authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, continuing into our present day. Meanwhile, women of the nineteenth century, still denied the vote and other rights, were barred from many professions, patronized, physically abused, and oppressed. It is remarkable how far back in America feminist voices were heard, from Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 "On the Equality of the Sexes" to Margaret Fuller to Sarah Moore Grimké and Fanny Fern, reaching a high point in the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton's great essay, "The Solitude of Self," and sweeping forward to the twentieth century. The essay, once considered a male province, has been nourished by the mental toughness and emotional honesty of so many bold, brilliant women in the last hundred years: think of Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Zadie Smith. . . . Even when suffrage was extended to blacks and women, there was still the problem of completing democracy by transforming it from a merely legal form to an everyday reality for all classes and groups. So John Dewey argued for students and teachers to have more of a voice in determining educational policy; Jane Addams addressed in her settlement house movement the problems of young people thrown together as strangers in big cities; and Randolph Bourne put forward his vision of a "trans-national America" that would embrace the diversity of immigrants from other than Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. Whenever the American essay has been unhitched from the urgent political and moral issues of the day, it has had to battle to stay commercially relevant. A specialty of the personal or familiar essay, in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Robert Louis Stevenson, is to focus on some seemingly small, trivial curiosity or annoyance of daily life, and to coax a larger significance from it. Some of the essayists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Agnes Repplier and Katharine Fullerton Gerould, excelled at this miniaturist belletristic form and found a home in magazines, but they also had to defend their work from charges that it was "genteel" or old-fashioned. The death of the essay was frequently if prematurely predicted. In 1919 Robert Cortes Holliday wrote good-humoredly: "It is said that essays are coming in again. Every once in a while someone says that. It is like prophecies concerning the immediate end of the world. However, it (either one of these prophecies) may be so this time." (How pertinent those remarks are may be seen by examining our own recent history. Publishers twenty-five years ago treated essay collections as pariahs and would not touch the stuff. Since then, essays have come roaring back, and today there are dozens of collections exciting popular interest. But that could easily change, in which case essayists would again have to package their wares in some other disguise.) One of the ways that the American essay kept alive in the 1910s, '20s, and '30s was to gravitate to the newspaper or magazine column, often in the guise of humor pieces. A fraternal order of such practitioners, which included Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, and Heywood Broun, called themselves facetiously the "colyumnists." Masters of the six-hundred-word essay, they were very popular, especially in metropolitan settings, and set the agenda for the talk of the town. Their seemingly casual throwaway tone, "typical Joe" persona, and modest claims as literary artists belied the fact that they were all highly educated in the traditions of the English periodical essay. At the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum, as far from the average Joe as possible, was H. L. Mencken, who employed an elevated, at times comically baroque, diction and took every opportunity to sneer at the provincial ignorance of the average American. In the Age of Mencken, roughly the 1920s, many writers felt alienated from American mass culture: some went abroad to Europe, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, to absorb a more sophisticated, worldly ambience, while others stayed home and tried to raise the cultural level. (The critic Alfred Kazin spoke of "our writers' absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.") This lovers' quarrel between America and its writers initially took the form of a mistrust of the masses and, later on, a wary suspicion about how consumerist mass culture would shape the people's mentalities. It was also a protest against the shortcomings of the American dream, or at least its bland, self-satisfied complacencies. The discordant note struck by many native essayists regarding the mythologies of American exceptionalism may have sprung from the artists' felt obligation to question received opinion. Many of the essays chosen for this anthology address themselves specifically--sometimes lovingly, sometimes critically--to American values. (See, for instance, the pieces by George Santayana, Mary McCarthy, and Wallace Stegner, each taking America's temperature.) But even those that do not do so have a secondary, if inadvertent, subtext about being American. E. B. White was an influential example of an essayist who conveyed, in a down-to-earth American tone, the average citizen's preoccupations at home, while remaining aware of the larger challenges facing society. In a United States where various groups have felt marginalized because of their ethnicity, national origin, gender, geographical location, or disability, members of these groups have increasingly turned to the essay as a means of asserting identity (or complicating it). Gerald Early, in his anthology Speech and Power, wrote: "Since black writing came of age in this country in the 1920s, the essay seems to be the informing genre behind it. . . . It is not surprising that many black writers have been attracted to the essay as a literary form since the essay is the most exploitable mode of the confession and the polemic, the two variants of the essay that black writers have mostly used." The same could be said for other minority groups in American society, who have benefited the essay form immeasurably by adapting it to their purposes, enriching the American language with their dialect-flavored speech. They have contributed to the "cultural unity within diversity" ideal that Ralph Ellison envisioned for this country. At the same time, the American essay has taken a turn toward greater autobiographical frankness, thanks in part to their efforts. Another skein of essay writing, of unarguable importance now that the planet finds itself endangered by climate change, is nature writing. In America, that tradition goes back at least as far as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and extends to John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, John Burroughs, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard, among others. We see in it an attempt to balance the factual and descriptive elements of flora and fauna with a fresh emotional access to wonder and awe. However alarmed these essayists may sound in their warnings of the threats to nature, there is still looming underneath an appeal to the original myth of America as the New World, a second Garden of Eden where humankind could finally get it right. II But wait: What is an essay? Many definitions have been proffered, none conclusive. Samuel Johnson called it "a loose sally of the mind." Marilynne Robinson said it was "thought in the pure enjoyment of itself." Chris Arthur wrote that "an essay is a literary electrocardiogram that traces out in words the pulse of thoughts" and "an essay arranges words with one eye on sense, one eye on style, and a third eye on wisdom." R. P. Blackmur called it a form of "unindoctrinated thinking," making it especially well suited to doubt, inconclusiveness, skepticism, and contrarian views. Not that it necessarily has to be inconclusive. We deduce from all this that it has something to do with tracking thought. Some have maintained that the essay must have an argument, must instruct; others, that essays must not do either. According to Agnes Repplier, "It offers no instruction, save through the medium of enjoyment, and one saunters lazily along with a charming unconsciousness of effort." That is one kind of essay, the informal essay, which depends less on reasoning than on authorial voice, what Elizabeth Hardwick called "the soloist's personal signature flowing through the text." But what about the formal essay? Doesn't it too need personal style of a sort? Many have tried to limit the field. William Dean Howells drew a strict border between the essay and the article. William H. Gass forbade the scholarly paper from consideration as an essay. Cynthia Ozick wrote: "A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. . . . A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' and Emile Zola's 'J'Accuse' are heroic landmark writings, but to call them essays, though they may resemble the form, is to misunderstand. The essay is not meant for the barricades; it is a stroll through someone's mazy mind." Much as I revere Howells, Gass, and Ozick, I respectfully disagree. We are just as privy to Thomas Paine's mind working through reasons to rebel as we are to his contemporary Hazlitt on the pleasures of hating, and why should a piece of writing be excluded from the essay kingdom simply because it follows a coherent line of reasoning? Even the lightest of familiar essays usually has an implicit armature of argumentation, just as essays that may not be overtly political invariably reflect an underlying politics. There are those who would seek to exclude criticism as a form of essay; but in my own experience, having taught and written a good deal of the stuff, I came to see that the best critics were all cobbling together a highly specific voice or persona through which their evaluations and insights could resound. So, for this anthology I have taken the position of opening it to every type of the beast: the familiar essay, the personal essay, the critical essay, the biographical essay, the dialogue-essay, the humor essay, the philosophical essay, the academic essay, and the polemic. I have included essays that occurred in the form of speeches (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.), letters (Frederick Douglass), sermons (Jonathan Edwards), papers (Jane Addams), dialogue-essays (Finley Peter Dunne, Oliver Wendell Holmes), newspaper columns (Fanny Fern). While belletrists would like to exclude journalists, I don't see how I could have left out such remarkable prose stylists from any compendium of the American essay. More, I have sought out essays from every walk of life, not just the ostensibly literary, based on my conviction that every discipline has exceptionally gifted writers who have tried to work out their thoughts on the page: in science (Albert Einstein, Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas), geography (John Brinckerhoff Jackson), social work (Jane Addams), education (John Dewey), theology (Paul Tillich), food (M. F. K. Fisher), art criticism (Clement Greenberg), and so on. In the main I have given preference to pieces of writing that began as stand-alone essays, but I have not hesitated to take a chapter from a book if I thought it functioned perfectly as an autonomous essay (Thomas Paine, W. E. B. Du Bois). Another criterion for selection was that the author needed to be American either by birth or emigration. Lest you infer that I have become utterly promiscuous in my embrace of any piece of writing that may lay claim to being an essay, out of some imperialistic land grab, let me reassure you that that is not the case. I have resisted fiction, including pieces that invent the facts or that attempt a hybrid form of fiction and nonfiction. On the other hand, there is room for speculation and imaginative flights of fancy in an essay, as witness James Thurber's "The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism." It is no accident that some of our greatest fiction writers and poets have also tried their hand at essays with excellent results: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, Howells, Twain, James, Dreiser, Cather, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Welty, Mailer, et cetera. A shorter list might be composed of those major American novelists and poets who did not excel at essay writing. Many of the choices here are no-brainers, the names one might expect: Thoreau, Baldwin, Mencken, White, Didion. (I have made it a rule not to repeat selections from my Art of the Personal Essay anthology when dealing with the same author.) But it has also been my special delight to try to rescue from oblivion such estimable figures as John Jay Chapman, Randolph Bourne, and Mary Austin, who seem in danger of sinking into that American night of historical amnesia. In general, blessed or cursed as I am with a historical sense, I have given the nod here to the past over the present--not just out of filial loyalty to the dead, but in the interests of creating "a usable past," to quote Van Wyck Brooks's apt phrase. There is another reason: many of these essays not only are in conversation with one another but speak vividly to our present moment by showing how often the same conflicts, over, say, immigration, minority rights, land use, or degree of cultural maturity, keep recurring on the national stage. Consider this anthologizing effort, then, not so much the assertion of a canon as a smorgasbord of treats, a place to begin to sample the endless riches of the American essay. I have tried to include representatives from different ethnicities, genders, regions, and aesthetic camps--not just to be politically correct, but simply because they deserve a place at the table for the quality of their prose. Still, editing an anthology is a chump's game: no matter how inclusive you may try to be, you will be criticized for various omissions, and some critics may even go through the table of contents with a calculator and total up the statistics, finding, say, too many dead white males. It can't be helped. Yes, there are regrettable omissions, given the stark reality of page limits: a binding can only hold so much. Where's Gore Vidal? Oliver Sacks? Philip Roth? (Phillip Lopate, for that matter?) The lyric essay? Fear not, reader: this is only the first of three volumes; the other two are forthcoming and should correct many of the worst omissions. Volume 2, The Golden Age of the American Essay, will focus more intensively on the postwar era, 1945-1970. Volume 3 will be dedicated to the contemporary essay, that is, the twenty-first century. Excerpted from The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

NoveList Results

Similar items.

glorious american essay

A glorious freedom

Book - 2017

glorious american essay

The best American essays

Book - 1986

glorious american essay

The making of the American essay

Book - 2016

glorious american essay

The Oxford book of essays

Book - 1991

glorious american essay

The best American essays of the century

Book - 2000

  • New eBook additions
  • New kids additions
  • New teen additions
  • Available Now
  • New Audiobook Additions
  • Popular Magazines
  • Cooking & Food
  • Health & Fitness
  • Home & Garden
  • News & Politics
  • Kindle Books

Title details for The Glorious American Essay by Phillip Lopate - Wait list

The Glorious American Essay

Description.

"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages."  —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

Expand title description text

Kindle Book

  • Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781524747275
  • File size: 6955 KB

Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook

History Literary Criticism Nonfiction

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9781524747275 Release date: November 17, 2020

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9781524747275 File size: 6955 KB Release date: November 17, 2020

  • Phillip Lopate - Author
  • Formats Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook
  • Languages English

Why is availability limited?

Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.

The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:

Read-along ebook.

The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.

Recommendation limit reached

You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase.

The Glorious American Essay

Description.

"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages."  —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

Expand title description text

Kindle Book

  • Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781524747275
  • File size: 6955 KB

Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook

History Literary Criticism Nonfiction

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book Release date: November 17, 2020

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9781524747275 Release date: November 17, 2020

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9781524747275 File size: 6955 KB Release date: November 17, 2020

  • Phillip Lopate - Author
  • Formats Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook
  • Languages English

Why is availability limited?

Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.

The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:

Read-along ebook.

The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.

Recommendation limit reached

You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase.

Session expired

Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages.

If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.

Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list.

Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection.

The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help.

IMAGES

  1. ‘The Glorious American Essay,’ From Benjamin Franklin to David Foster

    glorious american essay

  2. A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL(S) By Emily Temple Literary

    glorious american essay

  3. American Essay Contest

    glorious american essay

  4. The Glorious American Essay

    glorious american essay

  5. essay examples: american dream essay

    glorious american essay

  6. Copy of Reading Rhetorically The Glorious American Essay 1 .pdf

    glorious american essay

VIDEO

  1. Glorious Moment of Drakreign

  2. Glorious Sunset at Guatemala

  3. Glorious Feast of Theophany

  4. Glorious (Official Video )| Arjan Dhillon

  5. The Fundamental Laws of a Glorious Existence

  6. A9111 plus a bunch of rail cars over my camera

COMMENTS

  1. 'The Glorious American Essay,' From Benjamin Franklin to David Foster

    An essay from 1890 by Sui Sin Far is, as Lopate describes it, a "pioneering effort by a biracial Asian-American woman to examine the enigma of identity, and the conflict between a minority...

  2. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present: Lopate, Phillip: 9781524747268: Amazon.com: Books Books › History › Historical Study & Educational Resources Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery Kindle

  3. The Glorious American Essay

    "The Glorious American Essay situates the essay, an inherently democratic form of art, as the citizen-genre and nothing less than the literary cornerstone of the country. The mongrel nature of the essay is its strength: a mode of adaptability fit for differing, shifting, American ideals. This book could hardly be more timely, relevant, urgent ...

  4. Professor Phillip Lopate's 'The Glorious American Essay'

    December 11, 2020 The National Arts Club hosted an evening with Writing Professor Phillip Lopate '64 (CC), accompanied by Vivian Gornick and Wayne Koestenbaum to discuss Lopate's latest anthology, The Glorious American Essay .

  5. THE GLORIOUS AMERICAN ESSAY

    A thoughtfully edited volume that reflects America's changing social, political, and cultural life. Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4726-8 Page Count: 928 Publisher: Pantheon Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2020 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020 Categories: UNITED STATES | HISTORY | GENERAL NONFICTION Share your opinion of this book

  6. Professor Phillip Lopate Edits New Anthology 'The Glorious American Essay'

    The Glorious American Essay. His selection of incisive essays...charts the course of the great and flawed American experiment. It's a timely and invaluable anthology." According to Professor Margo Jefferson, "Once again and right on time, Phillip Lopate offers an indispensable anthology.

  7. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present. by Phillip Lopate . Details; Author Phillip Lopate Publisher Pantheon Publication Date 2020 Section Essays. Type New Format Hardcover ISBN 9781524747268 A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin ...

  8. The Glorious American Essay

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present Phillip Lopate Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020 - American essays - 928 pages A monumental,...

  9. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Co…

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present by Phillip Lopate | Goodreads Jump to ratings and reviews Want to read Kindle $10.99 Rate this book The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present Phillip Lopate 4.04 70 ratings14 reviews "Not only an education but a joy.

  10. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present By Phillip Lopate The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves-sometimes critically-to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American.

  11. Pushing the bounds of form in 'The Glorious American Essay'

    Yet "The Glorious American Essay" includes very methodical efforts like Alexander Hamilton's "Federalist No. 1" or "The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements," a paper presented ...

  12. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to

    A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

  13. The Glorious American Essay

    Description Details Reviews "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

  14. The Glorious American Essay

    What American essays should we remember today, and why? What contributions do they make to America's collective memory? The Mount invited Phillip Lopate to discuss his recent edited collection, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to Present, and the addition of Edith Wharton's lecture titled America at War ...

  15. The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present - Kindle edition by Lopate, Phillip. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Kindle Store › Kindle eBooks › Literature & Fiction Kindle Available instantly Hardcover $15.00 Paperback $14.99 Other Used, New, Collectible from Buy now with 1-Click ®

  16. The Glorious American Essay

    A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values.

  17. Celebrating a favorite writing form in 'The Glorious American Essay

    It's hard to read Phillip Lopate's " The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present " without recalling John D'Agata's three-volume "A New History of the...

  18. The glorious American essay

    The glorious American essay One hundred essays from colonial times to the present Book - 2020 "A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

  19. The Glorious American Essay

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present Phillip Lopate Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 17, 2020 - Literary Collections - 928 pages "Not only an...

  20. The Glorious American Essay

    The Glorious American Essay. by Phillip Lopate. ebook. Read a sample Read a sample Description; Details; Reviews "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie ...

  21. The Glorious American Essay

    A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric DisturbancesThe essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays ...

  22. The Glorious American Essay

    The Glorious American Essay. by Phillip Lopate. ebook. Read a sample Read a sample Description; Details; Reviews "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie ...

  23. The Glorious American Essay 1st Edition

    The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present 1st Edition is written by Phillip Lopate and published by Pantheon. The Digital and eTextbook ISBNs for The Glorious American Essay are 9781524747275, 1524747270 and the print ISBNs are 9781524747268, 1524747262. Save up to 80% versus print by going digital with ...