The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)

This is one of my very favorite books, a desert island pick for sure, and recommended to anyone with the least interest in nonfiction writing and all that it can do, which is a lot. Editor Phillip Lopate is a tireless advocate for a specific branch of nonfiction—the personal essay, which he characterizes (correctly, I think) as "one of the most approachable and diverting types of literature we possess." He then proceeds to make his case, in a book that clocks in at nearly 800 pages in trade paperback, with a number of usual suspects: Michel de Montaigne, Addison & Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Walter Benjamin, Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White, M.F.K. Fisher, Joan Didion, etc., etc. What I liked best were the unusual picks, uniformly so good that they sent me off time and again looking for more by many of the writers included—as often as not, Lopate's picks turned out to be the best of many, many lots, but don't hold that against him. I first encountered this anthology more than 15 years ago and I'm still using it as a reference. The thought and care that went into it is a constant feature. For example, the table of contents also includes separate listings by theme (ambition, city life, country living, death, disability and illness, drugs and alcohol, education, family ties, food, friendship, growing up, habitations, hatred and opposition, leisure and idleness, love and sexuality, marriage, music and art, nature, perception, politics, race and ethnicity, reading and writing, solitude, "theater, film, and other spectacles," thresholds, walking) and by form (analytic meditation, book review, consolation, diary/journal entry, diatribe, humor, list, lecture, letters, mosaic, memoir, newspaper column, portrait, prose poem and reverie, reportage, valediction). I suggest reading it cover to cover, as it hurtles through the years from ancient Greeks and Asians to latter-day examplars such as Gayle Pemberton, Richard Rodriguez, and Lopate himself (and why not?). There's also an annotated bibliography that stacks the to-be-read piles high—and, again, my experience has been that the references are as useful as the material between the covers itself. This is an absolutely solid work, with a sensibility and utility that goes well beyond its marketing thrust as a kind of freshman composition textbook. It's a big fat thing but reading it whole passed in a snap and left me wanting more where this came from. I wish he'd do another, or at least another edition of this double or triple the size. You just can't go wrong with it, really.

In case it's not at the library.