The golden age of the American essay : 1945-1970 / edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lopate, Phillip, 1943- editor, writer of introduction.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American essays--20th century.

American essays.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 519 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021.

Summary:

"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time." -Amazon.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: The Nation: Democratic Vistas (1945) / James Agee

Humor and Faith (1946) / Reinhold Niebuhr

The Sources of Soviet Conduct (1947) / George E. Kennan

Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases (1947) / Edmund Wilson

The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy: Should the Majority Rule? (1947) / Walter Lippmann

The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1948) / Robert Warshow

The Herd of Independent Minds (1948) / Harold Rosenberg

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1948) / Robert K. Merton

Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (1948) / Leslie Fiedler

Stranger in the Village (1953) / James Baldwin

Artists in Uniform (1953) / Mary McCarthy

This Age of Conformity (1954) / Irving Howe

Sootfall and Fallout (1956) / E. B. White

On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956) / Vladimir Nabokov

The University as Villain (1957) / Saul Bellow

The Last Lover (1958) / Lionel Trilling

A Good Appetite (1959) / A. J. Liebling

Making It! (1959) / Seymour Krim

Boston (1959) / Elizabeth Hardwick

Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction (1960) / Flannery O'Connor

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (1960) / John Updike

A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960) / Randall Jarrell

Modernist Painting (1961) / Clement Greenberg

The Obligation to Endure (1962) / Rachel Carson

An Evening with Jackie Kennedy (1962) / Norman Mailer

Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) / Martin Luther King Jr.

Writing About Jews (1963) / Philip Roth

Notes on "Camp" (1964) / Susan Sontag

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) / Richard Hofstadter

The Universal Trap (1964) / Paul Goodman

The Girl of the Year (1964) / Tom Wolfe

Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965) / Edwin Denby

The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) / N. Scott Momaday

The Twenty-Ninth Republican Convention (1969) / Gore Vidal

The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream (1970) / Albert Murray

One Night's Dying (1970) / Loren Eiseley

Home Is Two Places (1970) / Edward Hoagland

On the Morning After the Sixties (1970) / Joan Didion.

ISBN:

9780525567332

052556733X

OCLC:

1245584966