The Oxford Book of Essays

Book Overview

When Montaigne developed the essay in the sixteenth century, he could not have imagined the power and longevity of his creation. "He did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist," wrote Hazlitt, "but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind." Ever since, writers have seized upon his example, and for over four hundred years we have encountered astonishing insights and breathtaking language by following what has passed through their minds, as recounted in the essay. And now some of the finest essays of all time have been gathered together by John Gross, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, in an outstanding new anthology.
Ranging from the early 1600s through the 1980s, this sweeping collection includes 140 essays by 120 of the finest writers in the history of the English language. John Gross has collected classics and rare gems, representative samples and personal favorites, intimate essays and learned, serious reflections and hysterically funny satire, by both British and American writers. Here is Eveleyn Waugh, providing tips on how to move in Well-Informed Circles ("Attribute all facts of common knowledge to personal information; for instance, do not say, 'What a wet week it has been, ' but, 'They tell me at Greenwich they have registered the highest rainfall for six weeks'"); Ralph Waldo Emerson on conservatism and innovation; Ambrose Bierce on "the horror of the characteristic American custom of promiscuous, unsought, and unauthorized introductions"; Oscar Wilde on the critic as artist ("It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless"); Rose Macaulay on dinner parties; and James Baldwin, musing about what a remote Swiss village tells him about race in the wider world ("Joyce is right about history being a nightmare--but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.").
The authors Gross has gathered form a gallery of genius, all indispensable masters of rhetoric, from Samuel Butler to Samuel Johnson, from John Dryden to Ben Franklin, from Geoge Eliot to George Bernard Shaw, from E.B. White to Joan Didion. Including book reviews and travel sketches, history lessons and meditations, reflections on art and on potato chips, these essays sample four centuries of eloquence and insight in a collection that is at once immensely enlightening, edifying, and entertaining.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192141856
• ISBN13: 9780192141859
• Release Date: March 1991
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 2.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 2.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Fine selection of great pieces.

Gross was faced with a tough task when asked to edit this volume: how to cram the history of a form that is so flexible, and so widely used, into a compact volume? Essays have been selected from the seventeenth century on, and Gross has included writers from the USA as well as Britain. Almost his only concession has been the exclusion of any writer born after WW2. Plagued by so much choice, he has done a great job. Of course, there are omissions. Several writers from 'The New Yorker' have their say, but there was no room for its two best essayists, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. And the abscence of Kenneth Tynan is lamentable: his essay on the folly of the Lord Chamberlin, the Censor of Plays in Britain, is far better than that of Joseph Conrad, a brilliant novelist but an undistiunguished essayist, which is included here. But everyone will find a few favourites missing in any book of this kind. In fact, Gross has sometimes tried to be too representative, to include too many discrete essays, with the result that he seems to have plumped for very short pieces. Perhaps half a dozen writers seem to have been included simply because they are or were great writers, and not because they wrote great essays. Others are represented by inferior pieces, largely for reasons of space -- space often taken up by lesser writers. E.B. White, for instance, gets just over two pages for a pretty run-of-the-mill essay, where he would be better served by 'Death of a Pig' or 'Farewell, my lovely!', both of which are far better than, say, anything by Joseph Epstein. And John Updike's 'The Bankrupt Man' hardly gives an idea of what he's capable of. But these are minor quibbles. Anyone who enjoys reading essays will find countless hours of enjoyment in this book: essays by Samuel Johnson, Walter Bagehot, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, John Jay Chapman, and many others, are classics that repay many re-readings.