Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (9)

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.

41. Adrienne Rich. "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying." 1977. Using the technique of Pascal's Pensees and Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, the author jots down random thoughts on the phenomenon of women and lying, which most often occurs in order to survive in a male-dominated world.

42. Joan Didion. "The White Album." 1979. The author tells about and reflects on her experiences in 1968, experiences with the Black Panthers and college takeovers. She summarizes by saying that another author had said he put his experiences in writing so he could find meaning in them, but she has put these experiences in writing and still finds no meaning in them. Reflects the mood of the time.

43. Richard Rogriguez. "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood." 1980. The author noticed that the sounds, not the words, of his native Spanish communicated intimacy with his family, that the public language English did not convey that intimacy. It's not the words, but the spirit behind the words that conveys intimacy among the family. It's not the language, per se, that communicates intimacy, but the sounds and the spirit communicated through those sounds that enclosed the world of his family.

44. Gretel Ehrlich. "The Solace of Open Spaces." 1981. Living in Wyoming required the author to adjust to the wide open spaces, the laconic conversations and the feeling of being sealed in by isolation. In general, space is a good thing, enabling people to welcome all kinds of ideas, whereas we in the East build obstructions against space by filling up our spaces with the things we can buy.

45. Annie Dillard. "Total Eclipse." 1982. Impressions of the world as it looks during a total eclipse of the sun. The world no longer looks ordinary, setting off reflections on that changed world. A dead world. The world when the sun burns out. But then the eclipse is over and people hurry back to the now familiar world of their daily lives.