"The word essay we have from the French, in which tongue it signifies a trial or probation" (Thomas Culpeper, 1671).
We will sample glorious essays by America’s best writers spanning more than 200 years, including Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Willa Cather, and Zadie Smith. Welcome aboard!
Week 1. Beginning with Three Glorious Exemplars
Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That (1967) Bibliography #2; Guy Davenport, On Reading (1987); Philip Lopate, Against Joie de Vivre (1986) Bibliography #3
Week 2: The Nation’s Foundation
Thomas Paine, Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (1776); Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 1 (1787); Thomas Jefferson, Religion (1787); George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
Week 3: Women’s Rights… and Plights?
Judith Sargent Murray, On the Equality of the Sexes (1790); Sarah Moore Grimke, On the Condition of Women in the United States (1837); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Solitude of Self (1892); Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975)
Week 4: Wit
{Background Read: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, On Advertising for Marriage (1885)}
Oliver Wendell Holmes, from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858); Mark Twain, The Turning Point of My Life (1910); James Thurber, The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism (1929); Nora Ephron, A Few Words About Breasts (1972)
Week 5: Nature and Nurture
John Muir, A Wind-Storm in the Forests (1894); Mary Austin, The Basket Maker (1903); Rachel Carson, The Marginal World (1955); Edward Abbey, The Great American Desert (1977)
Week 6: Black Experience
{Background read: Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865); Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)}
Frederick Douglass, To My Old Master, Thomas Auld (1848); W.E.B. Du Bois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903); James Baldwin, Equal in Paris (1955); Ralph Ellison, What America Would Be Like without Blacks (1970)
Week 7: The Immigrant
{Background read: Theodore Dreiser, The City of My Dreams (1923)}
Sui Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1890); Emma Goldman, Was My Life Worth Living? (1934); Hannah Arendt, We Refugees (1943); Zadie Smith, Speaking in Tongues (2008)
Week 8: Odds and Ends
{Background Read: Dorothy Parker, Good Souls (1919)}
Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Furniture (1840); Agnes Repplier, The Grocer’s Cat (1912); H.L. Mencken, The Hills of Zion (1925); F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City (1932)
Week 9: The Classics
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience (1844); Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884)
Week 10: Lastly...
George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1913); Willa Cather, 148 Charles Street (1922); Wallace Stegner, The Twilight of Self-Reliance (1980)
Phillip Lopate, ed., The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present, Pantheon Books, 2020
2. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967
3. Phillip Lopate, Against Joie de Vivre, Ploughshares, Spring 1985
4. Thomas Culpeper, Of Essayes, 1671