A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form—from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion—s elected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America—racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them—proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time. “What’s marvelous is the way Lopate’s anthologies . . . manage to be not only comprehensive monuments of deep expertise, but such continuously fresh and thrilling reading companions.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective   “Phillip Lopate is one of the most brilliant and original essayists now working.” — Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature   PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction and of four essay collections, Bachelorhood , Against Joie de Vivre , Portrait of My Body , and Portrait Inside My Head. He is the editor of the anthologies The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York, and American Movie Critics . He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is professor of writing at Columbia University's nonfiction MFA program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. From the Introduction by Phillip Lopate There are certain historical periods when the essay suddenly comes to the fore, and is popular and talked about and relevant, before sinking back into a more typical commercially wan state. The post–World War II period and the decades that followed (1945–1970) were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. One would have to go back to the mid-nineteenth century American Renaissance of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Margaret Fuller to find a comparable flowering. Just to give some idea of the range and talent of the essayists in that era: there were masters of the form such as James Baldwin, E. B. White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and Edmund Wilson; critics in literature, film, painting, and dance such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Edwin Denby, James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Pauline Kael, and Irving Howe; policy pundits such as Walter Lippmann and George F. Kennan; theologians on the order of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr; novelists who moonlighted as essayists, including Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Flannery O’Connor, and Gore Vidal; poet-essayists like Randall Jarrell; social scientists and historians, including Robert K. Merton, Margaret Mead, Erving Goffman, Richard Hofstadter, and David Riesman; nature and science writers like Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, and Lewis Thomas; the food writers M. F. K. Fisher and A. J. Liebling; and New Journalists Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Seymour Krim. Why should this proliferation of the essay have occurred at this particular moment? One could offer several explanations. At war’s end, the United States was positioned as the dominant world power, which gave its writers a responsibility to reflect and criticize, with the vanity or expectation that the world would listen. The presence of European émigré thinkers who had fled fascism, such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Nicola Chiaromonte, and Thomas Mann, had raised the intellectual bar and invited a more cosmopolitan perspective, and a wish to emulate that sophisticated continental discourse. The figure of the public intellectual, who would be expected to transmit and explain complex ideas, was in ascension. The general public was willing to take instruction from learned commentators without bristling; for example,