Phillip Lopate (editor), The Glorious American Essay ***

I was attracted to this collection of "One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present" by its scope, with essays from 1726 through 2008, and its list of authors, a mix of the well known and the forgotten, of my favorites and those I know only by reputation.

Like nearly every essay collection, The Glorious American Essay starts with a preface defining the term. Lopate's inclusive definition ("I have taken the position of opening it to every type of beast") is the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, the collection includes sermons, (auto)biographical sketches, philosophical articles, book reviews, polemics––basically any non-fiction piece of appropriate length. On the other hand, this very eclecticism makes the anthology feel unfocused and random. Selections of historical importance such as Washington's farewell address appear alongside trifles like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Furniture," and Lopate's introductions are too brief to provide context. How do these selections collectively manifest the glory of the American essay?

Frankly, I would have preferred more traditional "familiar" essays, which show off the writer's style and temper of mind as they meditate on a subject the reader may not have considered before –– the kind of thing Lopate himself specializes in. (His essay "Against Joie de Vivre" is for me the epitome of the form.) Most of the pieces in this collection have strong writing, but relatively few of them show off the writer's personality or lead me to think about things in a different way. I was especially hoping to get a sense of character or style from writers I know mostly by name, such as Lewis Mumford, Adrienne Rich, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Paul Tillich. The oldest pieces show their age by making passionate arguments on long-settled topics such as equality of the sexes and races.

I was attracted to the book by the wide time horizon and unread authors, yet my favorites turned out to be written in my lifetime by authors who have impressed me before: Wallace Stegner's "The Twilight of Self-Reliance" and Marilynne Robinson's "Puritans and Prigs." I was struck by images from various nature writers: J Hector St John de Crevecoeur hunting bees, John Muir climbing a tree in a wind storm, Loren Eiseley empathizing with the mouse burrowing into his houseplants. Herman Melville's recommendation of Mosses from an Old Manse was fervent enough for me to add Hawthorne to my reading list.

This 900-page anthology contains thought-provoking ideas and images at regular intervals, but few sustained classics. What to do with a book like this? I can imagine wanting to return to, say, Eudora Welty's description of Ida M'Toy's secondhand clothing shop or Audubon's account of the massive flocks of passenger pigeons, but how would I wade through the less engaging pages? There are too many items to copy out into a highlights document; too few to justify reading the heavy tome again. These fine ideas and images are going to fade from my experience, aren't they? That is the fate of nearly all my reading (and IRL events!) as the past gets buried under the constant press of new material.