The Best American Essays of the Century

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.

Foreword / by Robert Atwan —
Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates —
Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain —
Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois —
Law of acceleration / Henry Adams —
Stickeen / John Muir —
Moral equivalent of war / William James —
Handicapped / Randolph Bourne —
Coatesville / John Jay Chapman —
Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams —
Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot —
Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway —
Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken —
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston —
Old stone house / Edmund Wilson —
What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein —
Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald —
Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber —
Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright —
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee —
Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost —
Once more to the lake / E.B. White —
Insert flap “A” and throw away / S.J. Perelman —
Bop / Langston Hughes —
Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter —
Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy —
Marginal world / Rachel Carson —
Notes of a native son / James Baldwin —
Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley —
Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty —
Hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall —
Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. —
Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe —
Notes on “Camp” / Susan Sontag —
Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov —
Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday —
Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick —
Illumination rounds / Michael Herr —
I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou —
Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas —
Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee —
Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass —
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston —
Looking for Zora / Alice Walker —
Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich —
White album / Joan Didion —
Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez —
Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich —
Total eclipse / Annie Dillard —
Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick —
Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester —
Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland —
Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould —
Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early —
Disposable rocket / John Updike —
hey all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates —
Graven images / Saul Bellow —
Biographical notes —
Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction