Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (6)

Best American Essays of the Century (26 - 30)
Editors: Oates and Atwan
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company
2000

Why read it? The essays are in chronological order from 1901 to 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.

26. Loren Eiseley. "The Brown Wasps." 1956. People and animals cling to memories and to places that have since changed--a department store replaces a field that once was tenanted by insects, birds, rodents and rabbits. The elevated goes underground and pigeons who used to be fed at its stations find the food they counted on gone. People and animals cling to the memories of what once was.

27. Eudora Welty. "A Sweet Devouring." 1957. Author talks about her love of reading series books. She discovers that the volumes that follow are not as good as the first. Then she discovered 24 volumes of Mark Twain, each book different. She had outgrown formulas for writing.

28. Donald Hall. "A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails." 1961. The author reflects on the life of Washington Woodward who could do anything on his farm, but whose life was wasted on moving rocks and saving old, used nails and talking about every detail of his experience. The author seems to conclude that the activities of Washington Woodward's life had no value to anyone. It was a full life, but it had no social significance. Seems to suggest that the traditional New Hampshire way of life was no longer relevant in the modern world.

29. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Letter from Birmingham Jail." 1963. In a letter that I think is as eloquent as anything I have ever read, King responds to white clergymen who criticize him for engaging in nonviolent peaceful protest that results in violence and who urge black people to wait patiently while white society adjusts to accept them. King quotes Aquinas and Martin Buber. He uses scathing logic. He uses plain statement of the treatment of blacks by whites. His message is, Why are not you, the white religious Christians, joining us in the march to justice n behalf of your black brothers to fulfill the Constitutional guarantees for its citizens? Unforgettable.

30. Tom Wolfe. "Putting Daddy On." 1954. Father visits his college-dropout son, living like a hippie, to try to talk sense into him, but his language, almost unintelligible in its use of metaphors, is incapable of being understood by his son whose point of view is completely different from his dad's. The two see the world differently, summarized by the father's final comment to the narrator as they leave the son's "pad" to take a taxi: "You tell me," he says. "What could I say to him? I couldn't say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn't make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one." That is, not one of his reasons for wanting his son to return to respectable middle-class life made sense to his son.