The Art of the personal essay : an anthology from the classical era to the present

For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay seizes on the minutiae of daily life-vanities, fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, taking a walk -- to offer insight into the human condition and the great social and political issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this fertile genre. By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays the tradition of the personal essay in all its historical grandeur, depth, and diversity. Cover Half-Title Title Page Copyright Contents Essays Arranged by Theme and Form Acknowledgments Introduction I. Forerunners Seneca On Noise Asthma Scipio’s Villa Slaves Plutarch Consolation to His Wife Sei Shonagon Hateful Things Kenko Essays in Idleness [Selections] Ou-Yang Hsiu Pleasure Boat Studio II. Fountainhead Michel de Montaigne Of Books Of a Monstrous Child On Some Verses of Virgil III. The Rise of the English Essay Abraham Cowley Of Greatness Addison & Steele Nicolini and the Lions (Joseph Addison) An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow (Richard Steele) Twenty-four Hours in London (Richard Steele) Love-Letters (Richard Steele) Samuel Johnson The Boarding House The Solitude of the Country Maria Edgeworth An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification Charles Lamb New Year’s Eve A Chapter on Ears Dream Children: A Reverie The Superannuated Man William Hazlitt On Going a Journey On the Pleasure of Hating The Fight Robert Louis Stevenson The Lantern-Bearers An Apology for Idlers On Marriage Max Beerbohm Going Out for a Walk Laughter G. K. Chesterton A Piece of Chalk On Running After One’s Hat Virginia Woolf Street Haunting The Death of the Moth George Orwell Such, Such Were the Joys . . . IV. Other Cultures, Other Continents Ivan Turgenev The Execution of Tropmann Lu Hsun This Too Is Life Death Junichiro Tanizaki In Praise of Shadows Walter Benjamin Unpacking My Library Hashish in Marseilles Jorge Louis Borges Blindness Hubert Butler Beside the Nore Aunt Harriet E. M. Cioran Some Blind Alleys: A Letter Roland Barthes Leaving the Movie Theater Natalia Ginzburg He and I Carlos Fuentes How I Started to Write Wole Soyinka Why Do I Fast? Sara Suleri Meatless Days V. The American Scene Henry David Thoreau Walking H. L. Mencken On Being an American Robert Benchley My Face James Thurber The Secret Life of James Thurber F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack-Up E. B. White Once More to the Lake The Ring of Time M. F. K. Fisher Once a Tramp, Always . . . Mary McCarthy My Confession Seymour Kirm For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son Alas, Poor Richard Gore Vidal Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self Adrienne Rich Split at the Root Edward Hoagland The Courage of Turtles The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain Wendell Berry An Entrance to the Woods Joan Didion Goodbye to All That In Bed Annie Dillard Seeing Richard Selzer The Knife Philip Lopate Against Joie de Vivre Scott Russell Sanders Under the Influence Gayle Pemberton Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey? Richard Rodriguez Late Victorians Selected BibIiography "For more than four hundred years the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its drive toward candor and confession, and its often quirky first-person voice, the personal essay offers above all a feast of individuality."--Jacket. More than 75 essays trace the development of the literary form from classical examples to contemporary English and American writers