Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (10)

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.

46. Cynthia Ozick. "A Drugstore in Winter." 1982. The author tells how she became a writer--through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father's drug store, all kinds of people either gave her or loaned her books and she consumed all of them.

47. William Manchester. "Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All." 1987. Manchester vividly describes the conditions under which his company of marines fought on Okinawa, the island from which, if there had been no atomic bombs, the invasion of mainland Japan would have been launched. The statistics of loss are staggering, more than Hiroshima, more Americans than at Gettysburg.

He pleads for Americans to remember those who died in war on Memorial Day. And he makes it clear that he has not forgiven the Japanese for what they did to his friends and fellow marines and to him personally. I think this essay should be read aloud at Memorial Day ceremonies. Americans need to understand the realities of war. They need to appreciate the conditions under which those who gave their lives--and those who survived--fought.

Tomorrow: The last of the essays.