The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays

746 Pages·1989·1.62 MB·English

by  Robert Pack

The Bread Loaf Anthology of
title:
Contemporary American Essays
author: Pack, Robert
publisher: University Press of New England
isbn10 | asin: 0874514754
print isbn13: 9780874514759
ebook isbn13: 9780585274249
language: English
subject American essays--20th century.
publication date: 1989
lcc: PS688.B687 1989eb
ddc: 814/.54/08
subject: American essays--20th century.
Page i
The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary
American Essays
Page ii
PUBLISHED FOR THE BREAD LOAF WRITERS' CONFERENCE
Middlebury College
Page iii
The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary
American Essays
Edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini
Page iv
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND
Brandeis University
Brown University
Clark University
University of Connecticut
Dartmouth College
University of New Hampshire
University of Rhode Island
Tufts University
University of Vermont
© 1989 by Bread Loaf Writer's Conference/Middlebury College
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or
reviews, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher. For further
information contact University Press of New England, Hanover, NH
03755.
Printed in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
The Bread Loaf anthology of contemporary American essays.
Bibliography: p.
I. American essays20th century. I. Pack, Robert,
1929 . II. Parini, Jay. III. Bread Loaf Writers'
Conference of Middlebury College.
PS688.B687 1989 814'.54'08 8840352
ISBN 0-87451-476-2
ISBN 0-87451-475-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-87451-475-4 (pbk.)
5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All of the essays in this collection appear by special permission of the
authors. Some of the essays first appeared in periodicals, private
editions, or elsewhere. To their editors, thanks are due.
"Writer and Region" by Wendell Berry first appeared in The Hudson
Review.
"Freud" by Harold Bloom was privately printed by the Simon H. Rifkin
Center for the Humanities in a volume called The Strong Light of the
Canonical.
(continued on page 379)
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Foreword
The dean of American essayists, E. B. White, described the
practitioner of his particular art in extravagant terms: "The essayist is
a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything
he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who
take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayists, each
new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country.
This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has
the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."
White, of course, was teasing. But only just. The essay, as a genre,
demands a peculiar "effrontery" and "stamina." Unlike the poem or
story, the essay proclaims itself as its author's own thoughts. It seems
to demandor enforcea kind of honesty, since the essayist must struggle
to define himself or herself as well as the subject at hand. Thus, the
essay seems naturally to attract autobiographers, writers willing to
weather the pressures that attend the creation of selfhood.
White's allusion to the essay as an "attempt" refers to the linguistic
origins of the form (the term derives from the French essai, meaning a
"try"), which underscores the necessary tentativeness of the genre. An
essay is not an article; it is not a thorough, scholarly treatment of an
isolated subject. By definition it is an exploration, a journey out that
frequently becomes, in the best examples, an inward journey, too, a
picking at the thread which finally unravels the garment of the writer's
particular concern and scrutiny.
The form itself has a distinguished history, beginning with Montaigne,
who wrote in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The English, of
course, have provided endless essayists of note, such as Dr. Johnson,
Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, Macauley, Huxley and
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Orwell. The American essay, too, has a rich history, with Emerson and
Thoreau not least among its practitioners. Far from being obsolete, the
form has attracted many of our best writers in recent decades, and we
are delighted to present a sampling here of essays written in the last
five years by some of our most distinguished writers.
Essays come in as many varieties as beans, and we think the range of
the essays here will surprise most readers. Their subjects range from
Freud (Harold Bloom), Frost (William Pritchard) and Sinclair Lewis
(David Bain) to evolution (Stephen J. Gould) and astrophysics (Heinz
Pagels). Some adopt a scholarly approach and style (Lawrence Buell,
Marcus Klein, Robert Brustein, Paul Mariani), while others add a
more personal, autobiographical note to an otherwise scholarly essay
(Robert Pack, Cynthia Ozick, Anatole Broyard). The genre has always
provided a lively forum for social critics, thus we include iconoclastic
essays by Gore Vidal and Ron Powers. The tradition of nature writing
associated in particular with American writers is represented in this
collection by Robert Finch, John Elder, Noel Perrin, and Don
Mitchell. The "familiar essay"the kind that Thurber and White made
famoushas its contemporary incarnations here in Samuel Pickering,
Paul Fussell, Jay Parini, David Huddle, and Nancy Mairs. The essay
has also attracted some of America's finest imaginative writers, from
Henry James to Joyce Carol Oates. We include a fair sample of essays
by poets (Wendell Berry, Nancy Willard, Linda Pastan) and novelists
(William Gass, Gail Godwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Lore Segal, and
Hilma Wolitzer); we also include a short story by Tim O'Brien written
in the guise of an essayan intriguing use of the essay voice.
Not all of the contributors to this volume have attended or taught at
the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (though most, in fact, have visited
or attended in some capacity). Each subscribes, in his or her way, to
the standards of excellence, the commitment to clarity and intellectual
honesty, that Bread Loafthe nation's oldest writers' conferencehas
represented for over six decades. We hope this anthology provides
many hours of informed enjoyment to our readers.
ROBERT PACK
JAY PARINI