Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (2)

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

Why read it? The essays are in chronological order, from Mark Twain’s “Corn-pone Opinions,” 1901, to Saul Bellow’s “Graven Images” in 1997. If you expect these essays to be pleasant, comforting and fun to read, you are mistaken. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the editors of the book, says, “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.” Most of these essays provoke. Many of them I had never read, but they paint a vivid portrait of the twentieth century.

Essays 6 - 10:
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. [I live less than five miles from Coatesville. I had never heard of this incident. I'm shocked. RayS.]

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.