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The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his foreward to the 2012 installment in the Best American series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods. If there is any essential characteristic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest examples of the form enact that ever-shifting process, and in that enactment we can find the basis for the essay’s qualification to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature and the essayist’s claim to be taken seriously as a creative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates took on the daunting task of tracing that ever-shifting process through the previous 100 years for The Best American Essays of the Century . Recently Atwan returned with a more focused selection for Publishers Weekly : “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.” To pare it all down to such a small number, Atwan decided to reserve the “New Journalism” category, with its many memorable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and others, for some future list. He also made a point of selecting the best essays , as opposed to examples from the best essayists. “A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.”

We were interested to see that six of the ten best essays are available for free reading online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” 1972 (Read it here with a subscription.)
Joan Didion, “The White Album,” 1979
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature,” 1988
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 2004 (Read it here in a version different from the one published in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his article, “the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.”

To read more of Atwan’s commentary, see his article in Publishers Weekly .

The photo above of Susan Sontag was taken by Peter Hujar in 1966.

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Humanities ›
English Grammar ›

Edited American English (EAE)

Hill Street Studios / Getty Images

An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

Edited American English is a variety of Standard American English used in most forms of academic writing . It is also called Standard Written English (SWE).

"Edited" English commonly refers to writing that has been prepared for publication in print (in contrast to online writing ).

The Brown University Corpus of Edited American English (BUC) contains approximately one million words of "present-day edited American English." Excluded from this corpus are any forms of spoken English as well as words found in verse, drama, and scientific writing.

" Edited American English is the version of our language that has come to be the standard for written public discourse —for newspapers and books and for most of the writing you do in school and on the job... Where did this description of Edited American English come from? It is the work through the years of many grammarians , many authors of textbooks and dictionaries , many editors who have taken it upon themselves to describe —and sometimes to prescribe —the version of English used by the influential writers and speakers of their day. Those writers and speakers don't say 'I don't have no money' and 'He don't like me' and 'I ain't going'—at least not in their public discourse. They say 'I don't have any money' and 'He doesn't like me' and 'I'm not going,' so those forms are the ones that get included in the grammar books and usage manuals as the standard." (Martha Kolln and Robert Funk, Understanding English Grammar , 5th ed. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)
"For college students, Edited American English consists of the language used in formal written documents, for example, in course essays, assignments, and term papers. The rigorous editing required for those tasks is not as necessary in more informal writing , such as journal entries, freewriting , blogs, and first drafts ." (Ann Raimes and Susan Miller-Cochran, Keys for Writers , 7th ed. Wadsworth, Cengage, 2014)

Examples of Usage in EAE: Singulars and Plurals

" Edited American English and most conservative American commentary insist that the singular nouns kind, manner, sort, type, style , and way must be modified by singular demonstratives ( this/that kind or manner or sort or style or way) and that normally each will be followed by an of phrase with a singular object ( this kind of dog, that manner of chatter, that sort of dilemma, this type of book, this way of writing ). Further, these same conservative American standards insist that when kind, manner, sort, type, way , and the like are plural , then the preceding demonstratives and any count nouns serving as objects of the following prepositions must also be plural: these kinds of studies, those sorts of poems, these types of airplanes . But when the following objects of the preposition are mass nouns , they may be singular, as in those sorts of gravel, those types of sand, these ways of thinking . Whatever the American Edited English standards demand, however, British English and American Conversational and Informal uses clearly display a full range of combinations of singulars and plurals..." ( The Columbia Guide to Standard American English . Columbia University Press, 1993)

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