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The Best American Essays of the Century


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Joyce Carol Oates chooses 55, chronologically arranged essays to represent the century's best, including work by Mark Twain, James Baldwin, T. S. Eliot, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy.


Available editions of The Best American Essays of the Century

9780618043705 9780618043705, Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

$10.00 (Fair. )

Other copies of 9780618043705
   
9780618155873 9780618155873, Paperback, Mariner Books, 2001

$5.22 (Good)

Other copies of 9780618155873
   

Publisher Notes

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.

Media Reviews

"An eclectic anthology...comprising a generous selection of less known but deserving work from mostly big-name writers....With so few surprises and most of the selections coming from the usual suspects, the overall effect is underwhelming. Above average, but definitely not the 'Best.'"

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