The Best American Essays of the Century

Best American Essays of the Century wraps up the creme de la creme of essay writing from 1901 - 1997. Beginning with Mark Twain ("Corn-pone Opinions") and ending with Saul Bellow ("Graven Images.") ( )

From my blog:

"I've never been great at writing book reviews, nevertheless, I want write about The Best American Essays of the Century. One of its main themes is about the relationship of between black and whites, as there are essays such as: Of the Coming John by W. E. B. Du Bois, Coatsville by John Jay Adams, Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr., and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. There are a few more in reference to this topic, but you get the idea.

The most interesting one for me is Coatesville. The essay is about how a town is guilty in horrifically lynching a black man in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, and how America needs to repent of their "wickedness" in the slave trade for no European country has never done such an evil thing as Coatsville.

In 1911, Adams went there to deliver his Coatsville message at a prayer meeting one year after the incident, and only two people showed up, but fortunately it was later published in Harper's Weekly in 1912.

Furthermore, The Handicapped by Randolph Bourne, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, and Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Adrienne Rich give their perspective on being a minority. The rest are a hodge podge of everything else. Most all of them are enjoyable to read, and inspire me to write more."

Link: http://pakws.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-on-best-american-essays-of.html ( )

What makes this collection the best of essays is that Oates takes care to identify those essays that speak to the historical, political, and personal experience of America in the 20th century. In this collection you'll find Eliot, Hurston, Fitzgerald, McCarthy, Baldwin, King, Kingston, Didion, Nabokov, Updike, Bellow, Rich and more. She shys away from nothing. I could find nothing missing. There are books that we buy and gobble up and there are those that we savour. You'll do both with this collection. I always have it close at hand. When I need to be reminded of how an essay reads in a masters voice, I pick up Oates' collection. ( )

Also not read in its entirety, but ongoing inspiration. ( )

What I read was certainly good. I dunno about "best of the century" though, really... ( )