Glorious, Golden, and Contemporary

On Phillip Lopate's New Anthologies of the American Essay

For essayists writing today, Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay is not only influential, but inescapable. The anthology, published in 1994, has never gone out of print, and in the past twenty-eight years sold thousands of copies, becoming a staple in the classrooms and bookshelves of nonfiction lovers everywhere. For an anthology, or any book, this is a wild success story. Lopate’s 1994 project was ambitious. In the introduction—a remarkably succinct, coherent, and comprehensive distillation of a sprawling form—Lopate works to define the essay, identifying it as a genre that frequently adopts a conversational element, values honesty and confession as well as privacy, and allows for contractions and expansions of the self. He writes of the essay as a mode of thinking and being, and paints essayists as writers who embrace melancholy, appreciate cheek and irony, and serve as keen observers of the world as well as themselves. While there are some who take issue with aspects of The Art of the Personal Essay, particularly when it comes to issues of diversity and representation, writers of literary nonfiction today who might claim to be unaffected by Lopate’s Art of the Personal Essay are—much like musicians who might try to downplay the importance of The Beatles—kidding themselves.

---

Continue reading this review for free online at FourthGenre.com.