Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (5)

Best American Essays of the Century (21 - 25)
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.

21. Langston Hughes. "Bop." 1949. The origin of Bop, from the noise a cop's nightstick makes on a Negro's head because he's black. Whites cannot understand Bop since they haven't been beaten about the head because they are white.

22. Katherine Anne Porter. "The Future is Now." 1950. An assessment of where we human beings are in the history of our existence in the world, with the atomic bomb the symbol of humanity's willful desire for self-destruction. But it may not be a world completed and, in the future, we could make a world in which its fragmented nature of today will be put together with some sense of meaning.

23. Mary McCarthy. "Artists in Uniform." 1953. The author tells how she reluctantly becomes engaged in a conversation about Jews with a prejudiced military man. He thinks because of her Irish name that he can safely say whatever he wants about Jews. He doesn't like them. The author waits until the colonel is about to depart again on the train to tell him that she is married to a Jew. A case study of a prejudiced miind and the futility of trying to change it with arguments based on logic.

24. Rachel Carson. "The Marginal World." 1955. The shore brings land and sea together. The author reflects on the interaction of the two.

25. James Baldwin. "Notes of a Native Son." 1955. Baldwin struggles with his hatred of whites. He recognizes that hatred is self-destructive, and concludes that he must accept life and people as they are, without rancor. But he is resolute that he will not stop fighting injustice.

To be continued.