Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (3)

Best American Essays of the Century (11 - 15)
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.

11. Zora Neale Hurston. "How It Feels To Be Colored Me." 1928. The title is the best summary.

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

13. 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.

14. F. Scott Fitzgerald. "The Crack-Up." 1936. Reflections on what he now realizes was a nervous breakdown. Maybe it was only depression. Youth and life end in unhappiness.

15. James Thurber. "Sex ex Machina." 1937. Man vs. technology.

To be continued.