The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

By Robert Atwan | Oct 12, 2012

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available. Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (thats the last century, by the way), we werent restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays, not essayists. A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesnt 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. James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harpers, 1955) I had never thought of myself as an essayist, wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovannis Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new post-racial world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwins illuminating intensity. The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955. Read the essay here. Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent, 1957) An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailers attempt to define the hipsterin what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsbergs Howlis suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailers hipster (a philosophical psychopath) for the ones we now find in Mailers old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares? Read the essay here. Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review, 1964)

Like Mailers White Negro, Sontags groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case camp, a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontagthirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted campy as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. The whole point of camp, she writes, is to dethrone the serious. Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp. Read the essay here. John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker, 1972) Go. I roll the dicea six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range. And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired Americas most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the boardAtlantic Avenue, Park Placewith actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essays end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975). Read the essay here (subscription required). Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West, 1979) Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murdersall of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didions brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, The White Album is a highly personal essay, right down to Didions

report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasnt until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979). Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus, 1982) In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988, Annie Dillard claims that The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can doeverything but fake it. Her essay Total Eclipse easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. Total Eclipse has it allthe climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years. Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares, 1986) This is an essay that made me glad Id started The Best American Essays the year before. Id been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spiritpersonal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what Id been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: Over the years, Lopate begins, I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best

American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989. Read the essay here. Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harpers, 1988) The best essayist of my generation, is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. Essays, Hoagland wrote, are how we speak to one another in printcaroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter. I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as The Courage of Turtles), but Im especially fond of Heaven and Nature, which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Hearts Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive. Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker, 1996) A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beards astonishing personal story about a graduate students murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, writes Beard, who worked in the U of Is physics department at the time of the incident, Youve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and theres your plasma. In outer space theres the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the authors dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997, the essay was collected in Beards award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

Read the essay here. David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet, 2004) They may at first look like magazine articlesthose factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCains 2000 presidential campaign but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallaces shortest and most essayistic is his coverage of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Consider the Lobster. The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe the Worlds Largest Lobster Cooker in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Dont gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005). Read the essay here. (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazines archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster.) I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers whod like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).