The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present by Phillip LopateMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This collection of essays exceeded my expectations. They were in fact glorious. There were only a small few that I did not enjoy, and some were just amazing, absolutely amazing.
One of my favorite essays is a long one by Wallace Stegner (1980): The Twilight on Self-Reliance: Frontier Values and Contemporary America. In this essay he covers with the early start of the Americas, with conquest and plundering of resources; then came the colonists, values and the “new” cheap land. The history of the United States is here comprehensively in this one essay that explains nearly everything. I was absolutely astonished by this essay.
Only one essay per writer, the essays are of varying lengths, a few very short just a couple of pages and several that are over twenty. Included are many, many familiar names, and many that are not. Even with the familiar the essays chosen are not the typical ones found in anthologies.
The book is dense, tiny print hardly any spaces and shrank the book to 900 pages, what a normal printing book might reach 1,500. When I started I quickly realized it would take some months. It did, just over three months for me with fairly consistent reading, but I had expected it to take longer. This book takes some considerable time to get through, but it was worth it.
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