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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950
By Robert Atwan | Oct 12, 2012
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Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best
essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of
the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten
selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I
decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese,
Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to
include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as
Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best
American Essays series. And I selected essays, not essayists. A list of the top ten
essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

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To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean
autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays
show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in
process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was
finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the
great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his
deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of
himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in
our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still
relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not
have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is
undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes
nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was
collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon
Press in 1955.
Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent, 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe
today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s
attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of
Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a
similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a
philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn
neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different
set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here.

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review, 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt
to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost
exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an
undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window
decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed
entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I
had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior.
But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see
the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is
to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is
not in itself an example of camp.

Read the essay here.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New
Yorker, 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the
flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this
brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic
City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board
game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee
juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with
actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game
but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was
a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay
was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West, 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim
Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of
these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation
(or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast
of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly
personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an
outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves
stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses
nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and
testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition
of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in
installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete
essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White
Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus, 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988, Annie Dillard claims that
“The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—
everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the
imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative
literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction,
the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal
essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before
felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying,
unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was
collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the
best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares, 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year
before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—
personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet
always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking
for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was
relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay
into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a
distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live.” He
goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner
party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and
collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989.

Read the essay here.

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland,
who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,”
Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not
merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge
or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have
selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of
Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at
his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation
with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The
Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an
unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to
stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker,
1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on
actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can
be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done
turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s
murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth
state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at
the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and
there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.”
Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the
tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the
seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest
friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997, the essay was
collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

Read the essay here.

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet, 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive

pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or
John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get
inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster
Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine
Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an
occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses
an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right
to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss
over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays
2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here. (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives
differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book,
Consider the Lobster.)

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a
wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most
outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best
essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century
(2000).

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