The Art of the Essay

Complete Essays by Aldous. Huxley In this fifth of six volumes in a major publishing enterprise, Huxley continues to explore the role of science and technology in modern culture, and seeks a final level of foundational Truth that might provide the basis for his growing interest in religious mysticism. His philosophy of history took its final form in this period. At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."-Jeffrey Hart. "He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references,"-Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times. "There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times, and of a window on to a stage in the evolution of his mind."-Economist. "You have to marvel at the range of [Huxley's] interests and the intelligence with which he explores them....What we experience in this high journalism is a man of intelligence, sensibility, and formidable erudition engaging his era and struggling for equilibrium while sharing the widespread perception that something ghastly has happened to European civilization...."-Washington Times

Facing Unpleasant Facts : Narrative Essays by George. Orwell George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected--and illuminated--the fraught times in which he lived. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword, "it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge--in short, to think--as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent." Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

All Art Is Propaganda by George Orwell The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984. As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line." With an Introduction from Keith Gessen.

Essays : a fully annotated edition by Henry David Thoreau This new selection of Thoreau's essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day--the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums--and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau's readers as they followed his developing ideas over time. Jeffrey S. Cramer, award-winning editor of six previous volumes of works by Thoreau, offers the most accurate text available for each essay and provides convenient on-page annotations. He establishes context and guides the reader through unfamiliar allusions and references, plumbing the depths of Thoreau's writings with unprecedented insight. Among the essays in this book: #65533; The Last Days of John Brown #65533; Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience] #65533; Thomas Carlyle and His Works #65533; Natural History of Massachusetts #65533; and many more

Walden by Henry David Thoreau One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism... "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Walden stresses the significance of self-reliance, solitude, meditation, and nature in rising above the the life of quiet desperation lived by most people. that, he argues, is the lot of most people. Part autobiography, part manifesto Walden is a moving treatise on the importance distancing oneself from the consumerism of modern Western society and embracing nature in its place.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

James Baldwin: Collected Essays by James Baldwin James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro.' Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published.

Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin From one of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the twentieth century comes a collection of "passionate, probing, controversial" essays (The Atlantic) on topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin Notes is the book that established Baldwin’s voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin’s own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.

The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift "This discourse, as it is unquestionably of the same author, so it seems to have been written about the same time, with 'The Tale of a Tub;' I mean the year 1697, when the famous dispute was on foot about ancient and modern learning. The controversy took its rise from an essay of Sir William Temple's upon that subject. At length, there appearing no end of the quarrel, our author tells us that the books in St. James's Library, looking upon themselves as parties principally concerned, took up the controversy, and came to a decisive battle." So begins Jonathan Swift's satire, The Battle of the Books, which tells of a great battle between the books in the King's Library. The name of his satire came be used in reference the the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.

Essays by Michel de Montaigne Considered the inventor of the essay itself, Michel de Montaigne published Essays (Essais, literally "Attempts") in 1850. Known for his skill at merging serious intellectual debate with personal anecdotes, his vast work collects together some of the most influential essays the world has ever seen, shaping the thoughts Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Isaac Asimov among others. Montaigne stated that his aim in writing these works was to describe humankind, including himself, with complete frankness.

The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present by Multiple Authors "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages."  --Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay, 1945-1970 by Multiple Authors A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form-from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion-selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate 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.

On Essays by Multiple Authors All students write essays, at school and university. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? It occupies an unsettling position, being both a form of literature and a style of knowledge. It is the fourth literary genre, long over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama; yet it is also a way of writing about any subject which rejects the methodical languages of universities and professions. The essay is an ambassador between literature and knowledge, expertise and experience, and brings together all the various conversations which do not usually come into dialogue with one another. In the twenty-first century, essays have once again become a vivid part of the literary landscape, with essayists and writers of lyric prose such as Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Maggie Nelson widely read and reviewed.Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on the history of the essay. Not simply an academic history or companion, On Essays is, rather, a series of seventeen elegant essays on major themes in the history of the genre, written by celebrated essayists and scholars - essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book on the essay in English hitherto published.

The Oxford Book of Essays by Multiple Authors When Montaigne developed the essay in the sixteenth century, he could not have imagined the power and longevity of his creation. "He did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist," wrote Hazlitt, "but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind." Ever since, writers have seized upon his example, and for over four hundred years we have encountered astonishing insights and breathtaking language by following what has passed through their minds, as recounted in the essay. And now some of the finest essays of all time have been gathered together by John Gross, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, in an outstanding new anthology. Ranging from the early 1600s through the 1980s, this sweeping collection includes 140 essays by 120 of the finest writers in the history of the English language. John Gross has collected classics and rare gems, representative samples and personal favorites, intimate essays and learned, serious reflections and hysterically funny satire, by both British and American writers. Here is Eveleyn Waugh, providing tips on how to move in Well-Informed Circles ("Attribute all facts of common knowledge to personal information; for instance, do not say, 'What a wet week it has been,' but, 'They tell me at Greenwich they have registered the highest rainfall for six weeks'"); Ralph Waldo Emerson on conservatism and innovation; Ambrose Bierce on "the horror of the characteristic American custom of promiscuous, unsought, and unauthorized introductions"; Oscar Wilde on the critic as artist ("It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless"); Rose Macaulay on dinner parties; and James Baldwin, musing about what a remote Swiss village tells him about race in the wider world ("Joyce is right about history being a nightmare--but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."). The authors Gross has gathered form a gallery of genius, all indispensable masters of rhetoric, from Samuel Butler to Samuel Johnson, from John Dryden to Ben Franklin, from Geoge Eliot to George Bernard Shaw, from E.B. White to Joan Didion. Including book reviews and travel sketches, history lessons and meditations, reflections on art and on potato chips, these essays sample four centuries of eloquence and insight in a collection that is at once immensely enlightening, edifying, and entertaining.

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson The major works of one of the nineteenth century's most influential philosophers In the early days of the American experiment, as the states spread across the continent and the young nation was reshaped by the Industrial Revolution, no intellectual held more power than Ralph Waldo Emerson. The leading light of the Transcendentalists, Emerson spent his life devising a uniquely American philosophy, a worldview as suited to the bustling docks of Boston as it is to the endless expanses of the West. Through lectures, letters, and essays, Emerson helped a nation discover its identity.   In this collection, which includes such monumental essays as "Nature," "Self-Reliance," and "The American Scholar," Emerson brilliantly articulates his philosophy of individualism and nonconformity. An inspiration to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and countless other literary and political figures, Emerson exerted a profound influence that continues to be felt more than a century after his death.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.  

Samuel Johnson: Selected Works by Samuel Johnson An anthology of the essential and enduring works of Samuel Johnson   Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain's preeminent man of letters--moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet--and his influence endures to this day. This anthology, designed to make Johnson's essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. It includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson's Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. The anthology is organized so that readers can focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature, and most texts are included in their entirety. The authors provide a biographical introduction and ample annotation to update and enlarge the commentary in the Yale Edition.

Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s And 70s (LOA #246) by Susan Sontag With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. 'What is important now,' she wrote, 'is to recover our senses... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' She would remain a catalysing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveller to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag's son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf Why is it that men, and not women, have always had power, wealth, and fame? Woolf cites the two keys to freedom: fixed income and one's own room. Foreword by Mary Gordon.

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk is the seminal work by Du Bois on race in late 19th-century North America. The way we think about and examine race today stems from his ideas. He spoke of the "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," and of the progress and obstacles to progress of the black American.