Best American Essays of the [20th] Century.

Best American Essays of the Century.
Eds. Oates and Atwan.
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Best sentence:
“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Mark Twain. “Corn-Pone Opinions.” 1901. The source of most men’s ideas is in imitation of others’ ideas.

WEB DuBois: “Of the Coming of John.” 1903. John, a young black man has been educated to think and to question. When he returns home from college, he is met by the stone wall of prejudice.

Henry Adams. “A Law of Acceleration.” 1906. The complexity of the modern world as bombs and knowledge double in power and ideas every ten years leads to contradictions.

William James. “The Moral Equivalent of War."1910. Wm. James suggests that the “moral equivalent of war” would be service for young people in the country’s behalf. Young people would be “drafted” to be trained to work in mines, on highways, etc. Thus the military virtues—the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching—would be preserved without war.

Randolph Bourne. “The Handicapped.” 1911. The inner thoughts of a disabled person. He analyzes his condition, the responses of others to him, and understands that his disability has advantages as well as disadvantages. He insists especially on developing and recognizing his individuality as opposed to the belief of those whom he encounters that disabled people do not have the potential for success as do the healthy.

John Jay Chapman. “Coatesville.” 1912. Expresses his horror and rage at the burning of a black man in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, while hundreds of white onlookers did nothing.

Jane Addams. “The Devil Baby at Hull-House.” 1916. A rumor that a devil baby is at Hull House brings many women to see what they believe to be retribution for some domestic sin committed by a man against a woman or child. The stories of most of these women are of unrelieved tragedy at the hands of their husbands. The problem of the rights of women in a man’s world pre-dates the later Civil Rights movement of the treatment of African Americans in a white world.

T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. Several ideas merge in this essay. The poetry of the past lives although the poet is dead. The poet’s craftsmanship puts emotion in the poem; it is not the emotion of the poet himself. The individual poet in the present must be aware of what lives in past work so that he can produce poetry that lives now and in the future as part of that past. Eliot is laying the groundwork for the “New Critics,” who emphasized studying the work of art, not the poet, and certainly not, as Rosenblatt contends, to encourage readers to interpret the work of art with their personal experience.

Ernest Hemingway. “Pamplona in July.” 1923. Hemingway reports on the bullfights at Pamplona in Spain.

H.L. Mencken. “The Hills of Zion.” 1925. Mencken went to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes monkey trial. While there, he observed a religious ritual of fundamentalist Christians who went into convulsions, howling hosannas.

Zora Neale Hurston. “How It Fells To Be Colored Me.” 1928. The title is the best summary.

Edmund Wilson. “The Old Stone House.” 1932. A trip back to the town of his youth and a mood of depression as it demonstrates to him a way of life that he would never want to experience again.

Gertrude Stein. “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.” 1935. Now I understand “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Convoluted sentences. Erratic punctuation. Her idea about masterpieces is almost like TS Eliot’s effacement of the author’s personality in creating a work of poetry. Stein says if you remember you are you, you cannot create a masterpiece. You are limited by your personality and identity. If you efface your identity, you can create a masterpiece. Automatic writing? Sensible ideas are occasionally thrown into what appears to be a random collection of thoughts in stream of consciousness. But the piece is well organized. She moves from defining a masterpiece to explaining why there are so few masterpieces—most writers remember themselves and their identities and therefore cannot produce anything truly original. I guess.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Crack-Up.” 1936. Reflections on what he now realizes was a nervous breakdown. Maybe it was only depression. Life and youth end in unhappiness.

James Thurber. “Sex ex Machina.” 1937. Man vs. technology.