Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (8)

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 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.

36. Maya Angelou. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." 1970. Growing up in Stamps, Ark., the author as a young girl suffers both indignities herself and the indignity of watching her relatives as they are threatened or taunted by whites. Her mother always sang hymns to help her endure existence and to dream of relief from that existence in God. That's why the "caged bird" sings.

37. Lewis Thomas. "The Lives of a Cell." 1971. The single cell with its complexity.... "...with too many working parts lacking visible connections...." is like the complexity of the earth and the earth is most like the single cell.

38. John McPhee. "The Search for Marvin Gardens." 1973. Contrasts Monopoly, the game, with the real world of the sordid streets and places in Atlantic City.

39. William H. Gass. "The Doomed in Their Sinking." 1973. Thoughts on the subject of suicide.

40. Alice Walker. "Looking for Zora." 1975. In looking for the place where Zora Neale Hurston was buried in Florida, the author meets a number of people who knew her. Their stories sometimes contradicted each other. But Zora's personality, her ability to look at life as it is, without tears, and her independent thinking, seem to have separated her from her family, from her husband, and from the majority of other blacks. "She was not a teary sort of person...." And she was a great writer and collector of African-American folklore, who died in poverty.