Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (4)

Best American Essays of the Century (16 - 20)
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.

16. Richard Wright. "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." 1937. Learning to live in a white man's world, a world of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Richard Wright and other blacks who endured this cruelty were bitter. This story is raw and inspires hatred of the Southern whites.

17. James Agee. "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." 1938. Impressions of an idyllic, soft summer night surrounded by family and friends. Told from the point of view of a little boy. Reminds of Remembrance of Things Past by Proust.

18. Robert Frost. "The Figure a Poem Makes." 1939. Frost reflects on the response he has to poems. His most memorable line: "It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

19. E.B. White. "Once More to the Lake." 1941. On his return to the Maine lake where he spent his summers as a child, as an adult with his children, the author feels the years slipping away. Everything is the same as when he was a child. Almost. Outboard motors are an irritant. And as he watches his young son, he has a premonition of his death.

20. S. J. Perelman. "Insert Flap 'A' and Throw Away." 1944. "One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique, the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 degrees F., and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack, and a packet of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like 'Pass section F through slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washer (See Fig. 9).' The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb."