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The Best American Essays 1999 (The Best American Essays)

By edward hoagland , andré aciman , charles bowden , franklin burroughs , michael cox , joan didion , annie dillard , brian doyle , ian frazier , dagoberto gilb , mary gordon , patricia hampl , barbara hurd , john lahr , hilary masters , john mcneel , ben metcalf , arthur miller , joyce carol oates , cynthia ozick , david quammen , daisy eunyoung rhau , scott r. sanders , mark slouka , toure , and george w. s. trow.

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The Best American Essays

Ponder life. Read an essay today.

The Best American Essays 1999

Edited and with an Introduction by  Edward Hoagland Robert Atwan , Series Editor

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THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1999

edited by Edward Hoagland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1999

A feast of fine, important writing.

Atwan’s annual series unfailingly delivers the highest quality writing, essays that display “literary [and] ruminative characteristics,” work that shows the “mind in process.”

This year’s editor, Edward Hoagland—a fine essayist in his own right—has collected essays by some of the best writers in the country: Joyce Carol Oates, Ian Frazier, Scott Russell Sanders, Mary Gordon, Dagoberto Gilb, David Quammen, and others. Hoagland echoes Atwan in noting that essays “simulate the mind’s own process.” He connects the current revival of the essay to that of the rage for personal memoir. (And he never once uses the phrase “creative nonfiction.”) Sanders’s marvelous piece tackles a traditional essay theme, as Hubble photographs and his daughter’s wedding spur musings on the origin of the cosmos and an examination of the concept of beauty. He is “certain that genuine beauty is not in my eye alone but out in the world.” In a startlingly revealing essay, “After Amnesia,” Joyce Carol Oates recalls a “humiliating experience” that occurred while she was touring a New Jersey detention center. Gordon’s personal essay relates the opening of a Bonnard exhibit at MOMA at the same time that her mother, in a nursing home, turns 90: “1 wonder if Bonnard could do anything with this lightless room.” John Lahr revisits his youth with his famous father, Bert, on the re-release of The Wizard of Oz and finds the ubiquitous commercialization of the Cowardly Lion “the enduring monument to Dad’s comic genius.” There’s also Joan Didion’s brilliant argument against the release of Hemingway’s unpublished work, Annie Dillard’s examination of religious belief, Gilb’s chance encounter with actress Victoria Principal, Toure’s boxing days at the Body and Soul Gym and Frazier’s delightful recollection of the “hundred pointless things we did in the woods” as 10-year-olds.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-86054-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

GENERAL NONFICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Edward Hoagland

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50th anniversary edition.

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

More by E.T.A. Hoffmann

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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The best american essays 1999 - hardcover.

• 4.11 4.11 out of 5 stars 74 ratings by Goodreads

• About this title
• About this edition

This year's wonderfully diverse collection, which features such respected writers as Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Mary Gordon, and Arthur Miller. These essays range widely across the American landscape -- from a California monastery to a Manhattan apartment -- and along the way introduce us to a fine array of talented new voices. Called by John Updike "the best essayist of my generation," Hoagland has assembled a powerful volume that vividly showcases the art and craft of the contemporary essay. IN SEARCH OF PROUST by Andre Aciman, TORCH SONG by Charles Bowden, COMPRESSION WOOD by Franklin Burroughs, VISITOR by Michael W. Cox, LAST WORDS by Joan Didion, FOR THE TIME BEING by Annie Dillard, THE METEORITES by Brian Doyle, A LOVELY SORT OF LOWER PURPOSE by Ian Frazier, VICTORIA by Dagoberto Gilb, STILL LIFE by Mary Gordon, A WEEK IN THE WORD by Patricia Hampl, THE COUNTRY BELOW by Barbara Hurd, THE LION AND ME by John Lahr, MAKING IT UP by Hilary Masters, ON THE FEDALA ROAD by John McNeel, AMERICAN HEARTWORM by Ben Metcalf, BEFORE AIR CONDITIONING by Arthur Miller, AFTER AMNESIA by Joyce Carol Oates, THE IMPIOUS IMPATIENCE OF JOB by Cynthia Ozick, PLANET OF WEEDS by David Quammen, ON SILENCE by Daisy Eunyoung Rhau, BEAUTY by Scott Russell Sanders, HITLER'S COUCH by Mark Slouka, WHAT'S INSIDE YOU, BROTHER? by Toure, FOLDING THE TIMES by W. S. Trow.

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About the Author

Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs African Calliope and Notes from the Century Before, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman s Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines including Harper s and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha s Vineyard and his farmhouse in the mountains in Burton, Vermont.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Writers Afoot Essays 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. You multiply yourself as a writer, gaining height as though jumping on a trampoline, if you can catch the gist of what other people have also been feeling and clarify it for them. Classic essay subjects, like the flux of friendship, "On Greed," "On Religion," "On Vanity," or solitude, lying, self-sacrifice, can be major-league yet not require Bertrand Russell to handle them. A layman who has diligently looked into something, walking in the mosses of regret after the death of a parent, for instance, may acquire an intangible authority, even without being memorably angry or funny or possessing a beguiling equanimity. He cares; therefore, if he has tinkered enough with his words, we do too. An essay is not a scientific document. It can be serendipitous or domestic, satire or testimony, tongue-in-cheek or a wail of grief. Mulched perhaps in its own contradictions, it promises no sure objectivity, just the condiment of opinion on a base of observation, and sometimes such leaps of illogic or superlogic that they may work a bit like magic realism in a novel: namely, to simulate the mind's own processes in a murky and incongruous world. More than being instructive, as a magazine article is, an essay has a slant, a seasoned personality behind it that ought to weather well. Even if we think the author is telling us the earth is flat, we might want to listen to him elaborate upon the fringes of his premise because the bristle of his narrative and what he's seen intrigues us. He has a cutting edge, yet balance too. A given body of information is going to be eclipsed, but what lives in art is spirit, not factuality, and we respond to Montaigne's human touch despite four centuries of technological and social change. Montaigne's Essais predated by a quarter-century Cervantes's Don Quixote, which was probably the first novel. And the form of composition Montaigne gave a name to would not have lasted so long if it were not succinct, diverse, and supple, able to welcome ideas that are ahead of or behind the blurring spokes of their own time. But whereas a novelist is often a trapezist, vaulting from book to book, an essayist is afoot. Not a puppetmaster or ventriloquist, he will sound recognizable in his next appearance in print. There is a value to this, though Don Quixote as a figure outshines any essay. Imperishably appealing, he is an embodiment, not speculation, and we can simply call him to mind, much as we remember Conrad's Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, although the regimes up the Congo River and in London aren't now the same. An essayist's materials are drawn primarily from his or her own life, and he knits a skein of thoughts and impressions, not a made-up tale. An epic drama such as King Lear is thus not his province even to dream about. His work is humbler, and our expectations of him are less elastic than of novelists or poets and their creations. They can flame out in a flash fire, surreal or villainous, if the story is compelling or the language smacks a bit of genius. We accept different behavior from C�line or Genet, Christopher Smart or Ezra Pound, than from Dr. Johnson. Norman Mailer can stab his wife and William Burroughs can shoot his, and somehow we don't blanch. They "needed to," one hears it said. Their imaginations must have got the better of them. But if an essayist had done the same it would have queered his legacy. He is supposed to be the voice of reason. Though modestly chameleon as a monologuist (and however much he wants to recalibrate it), he is an advocate for civilization. He doesn't murder a foe in the street, like the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, or get himself slain in a tavern brawl, like the playwright Christopher Marlowe, or gut-shot, like John Ruskin, in a duel. A murderer or madwoman quarantined in a book on the bedside table can provide excitation and cautionary reading, but an essayist, being his own protagonist, should be faceted rather like a friend. We might give him our keys and put him up in the guest room. He won't be stealing the silverware and debauching the children, and, after sleeping on our problems, he will sit at the breakfast table in the morning sunshine and tell us what we ought to do. Or, at the outside, if - like the master essayist Charles Lamb - his sister has slaughtered his mother, he will devote the next thirty-odd years to piecing together a productive existence for himself and her, not despairing like an aficionado of the Absurd. Essayists are not Dadaists, and in the endgame that may be in progress - with our splintering attention span, our hiccuping religions, staccato science, and spinning solipsism - they may prove useful. Do we human beings have a special spark of divinity? And if so, as we mince our habitat and compress ourselves into ever tighter spaces, having always claimed that there couldn't be too much of a good thing, how many of us are finally going to constitute a glut of divinity? Judeo-Christianity hasn't said. Nor did "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," which Thomas Jefferson invoked at the beginning of our Declaration of Independence. Or Emerson's rapturous prescription in Nature in 1836 (Emerson being the other founding father of essay writing in America) that an intelligent observer should become "a transparent eye-ball . . . part or particle of God," amid nature's ramifying glory. Now, man threatens to become a divinity doubled, redoubled, and berserk ad nauseam. However, the essay's brevity, transparency, and versatility should suit this age of reconsideration. Essays are a limited genre because the writer will suggest that life is more than money, for example, without inventing Scrooge; that brownnosing demeans everybody, without the specter of Uriah Heep. Candide, Starbuck, Injun Joe, Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp led lives more far-fetched than an essayist's, whose medium is mostly what he can testify to having seen or read. Working in the present tense, with common sense his currency, "This is what I think," he tells the rest of us. And even if he speaks about alarming omens, we feel he'll be around tomorrow, not leap headlong into life and burn to a crisp at thirty-two or twenty-eight, like Hart Crane or Stephen Crane, or wind up forlorn in a railroad station fleeing his wife, as Tolstoy did when dying. The limitations are reassuring as well as tethering. James Baldwin didn't metamorphose into an arsonist or a rifleman when he warned against race war in The Fire Next Time. And George Orwell deconstructed colonialism in essays considerably more nuanced than Heart of Darkness - supplementing though not supplanting Kurtz's immortal line "The horror! The horror!" In a way, it's easier to visit a headwaters area of the Nile or Congo and find conditions not substantially improved since independence when you've read Orwell as well as Conrad on human nature, because these nuances prepare you better for disillusion. Conrad's picture was so stark, surely never again would the world see comparable scenes! Ripples sway us - traffic tie-ups on a cloverleaf, on-line stock swings, revenge-of-the-rain-forest viral escapees - at the same time that our proud provincialism is called upon to bend the mind around Islam's surging claims, Latino vigor and disorder, chaos in Africa, and a Chinese-puzzle future. In a famine belt along the upper Nile, I've seen child-sized raw-dirt graves scattered everywhere beside a poignant web of paths of the sort that starving people pace. A scrap of shirt or broken toy was laid on top of each small mound to personalize the spot; and hundreds of bony, wobbling children who had survived so far ran toward me (a white-haired white man) to touch my hands in hopes that I might somehow be powerful enough to bring in shipments of food to save their lives. Their urgent smiles were giddy or delirious in skulls already outlined under tightened skin - though they were fatalistic, almost docile, too, because so many adults had told them for so many weeks that there was nothing to eat and so many people whom they knew had died. I interviewed the Sudanese guerrilla general who was in charge of protecting them about what could be done, but he was delayed a little that afternoon because (I found out later from an Amnesty International report) he had been torturing a colleague by pounding a nail through his foot. Now, essayists in dealing with the present tense are stuck with the nuts and bolts of what's going on. And what do you say about that endgame on the Nile, which I believe was a forerunner, not an anomaly? I expect an epidemic of endgames and disintegration in other forms. Essayists will become "journeymen," in a new definition for that hackneyed term: out on the rim, seeing what's in store. The cataract of memoirs being published currently may be a prelude to this - memoirs of a cascading endgame. Yet essayists are not nihilists as a rule. They look for context. They feel out traction. They have a stake in society's survival, breaking into the plot line of an anecdote to register a reservation about somebody's behavior, for instance, in a manner that most fiction writers would eschew, because an essayist's opinions are central, part of the very protein that he gives us. Not omniscient like a novelist, who can create a world he wants to work with, he has the job of finding coherence in the world that we already have. This isn't harder, just a different task. And he usually comes to it in middle age, having acquired some ballast of experience and tested views - may indeed have written several novels, because of the higher glamour and freedom of that calling. (For what it's worth, I sold my first novel at twenty-one and wrote my first essay at thirty-five.) "Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth," as Picasso said; and to capture within an imagined story some petal of human longing and defeat is an achievement irresistibly appealing. Essayists, by denying themselves that license to extravagantly fudge the facts of firsthand observation, relegate themselves to the Belles Lettres section of the bookstore, neither fiction nor journalism, because they do partly fudge their reportage, adding the spice of temperament and a lifetime's favorite reading. And if an enigma seems a jigsaw, they will tend to see a picture in it: that life therefore is not an oubliette. The fracases they get into are on behalf of democracy, as they see it (Montaigne, Orwell, and Baldwin again are examples), and their iconoclasm commonly leans toward the ideal of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," which journalists used to aspire to. Like a short-story writer, an essayist is after the gist of life, not Balzacian documentation. And, like a soothsayer with a chicken's entrails, he will spread his innards out before us to discern a pattern. Not just confessional, however, a good essay is driven by the momentum of an inquiry, searching out a point, such as are we divine? - an awfully big one for a lowly essayist, but it may be the question of the coming century. Essayists also go to the fights, or rub shoulders on the waterfront, get divorced ("Ouch," says the reader, "that was like mine"), nibble canap�s, playing off their preconceptions of a celebrity or a politician against reality. They will examine a prejudice (is this piquant or ignoble, educated or soggy?) or dare a pie in the face for advancing an out-of-fashion idea. Or they may simply saunter, in Thoreau's famous reading of the word: � la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, or sans terre, at home everywhere - maybe only to the public library to browse among dead friends. Although a novelist can blaze along on impetuous obsessions and we will follow if Scheherazade has set her cap to catch us (and then what happened?), an essay is a current of thoughts corduroyed with sensory impressions, an author afoot, solo, with no movie sale in the offing or hefty hope of fame. Speaking his mind is likely to be a labor of love, and risky because if a work of fiction flops, at least it's nominally somebody else's persona that has been boring the reader. A solo voice welling up from self-generating sources, or what Thoreau once called an "artesian" life, has not been the dominant mode of expression for the past half-century, so most of the best essays have had to find a home in magazines of lesser circulation, like Harper's, the Village Voice, the American Scholar, Outside, Yale Review, or the Hungry Mind Review. The first-tier publications had corporate styles and personalities, each one insisting upon its editorial "we." But recently publishing has met with such a swirl of confusion that even flagship magazines have been losing money or grandiosity and wondering what tack to take. Essays are reappearing in unexpected places, in National Geographic as well as The New Yorker, and on the airwaves and in newspapers, as corrective colloquy or amusing "occasionals." Paralleling the flood of memoirs that are coming out, the essay form is in revival. And the two genres do overlap, though for essays a narrative is not an end in itself, as it can be in a memoir. A sense of emergency, I suspect, is powering the popularity of memoirs, the urge for quicker answers than we get from reading novels: What's happening? How shall we live? Nature, which Jefferson and Emerson regarded as central to the health of society, is lately treated as a kind of dewclaw on our collective consciousness. This will, I think, begin to change in the face of ecological catastrophes, and essayists will be in on the action again - as they have attacked so many problems before, from slavery to political tyranny, in the struggle to preserve civilization from itself. (War is a "human disease," Montaigne said.) The most civil of the literary arts, yet also a "book of the self," "spying on the self from close up," essays are versatile enough that in the same piece, "Of Experience," in which Montaigne says that "death mingles and fuses with our life throughout," he tells us that he can't make love standing up and speaks considerably about his kidneys, urination, and bodily "wind." Wholehearted, supple, an essayist over time may tell you everything you might want to know about him and stretch that measurement a bit, the way a friend or spouse or partner gradually does, until nothing about the living package of that person turns you off. If you know the anguish, joy, and bravery somebody has experienced, you can also share their episodes of shame and indigestion. Like you, an essayist struggles with the here and now, the world we have, with sore and smelly feet and humiliation, a freethinker but not especially rich or pretty, and quite earthbound, though at his post. Like Thoreau later on (according to Emerson's report), ...

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• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date 1999
• ISBN 10  0395860547
• ISBN 13  9780395860540
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition number 1
• Number of pages 297
• Editor Edward Hoagland , Robert Atwan

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The Emily Dickinson Archive by Emily Dickinson

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

Geography III: Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry by Rita Dove

1 The Cambridge History of American Poetry by Alfred Bendixen & Stephen Burt (eds.)

2 the emily dickinson archive by emily dickinson, 3 lunch poems by frank o'hara, 4 geography iii: poems by elizabeth bishop, 5 the penguin anthology of twentieth century american poetry by rita dove.

Y ou proselytize for poetry as a professor at Harvard and through Poetry in America , a multi-platform program that includes online courses and an intensely-entertaining television series. What inspires you to be such a spirited self-described “poetry evangelist”?

Your television series  Poetry in America  throws off what you’ve called “the scholarly harness.” Tell us about this approach to poetics.

The series endeavors to enhance the experience of poetry using tools that are unique to TV. When I taught Langston Hughes to students, to relay how he was influenced by jazz and blues, I brought a clumsy cassette player to class. When I taught Edna St Vincent Millay, to convey how she embodied ‘the new woman,’ I brought in 1920s magazines so students could see how she wore her hair and her hemlines.

Television allows us to portray the world of a poem in a multimedia way, mixing in images and music. And when a poem holds itself aloof from the world, television allows us to empty our screens and give words new vibrancy. The toolkit of television gives viewers an intellectual and emotional immersion in poetry that is quite magical. It’s wonderful to be part of the reemergence of smart small screen entertainment.

What characteristics classify a poem as American, by your lights?

The Cambridge History of American Poetry is your first title. Tell us about it.

This forbidding-looking tome weighs about five pounds; it makes quite a doorstop. As a person who teaches survey courses, I know students love surveys. We love sampling. When you asked me to make this list, I was thinking about a reader with an appetite for learning more about poetry. Such a reader might enjoy a smorgasbord of fascinating stuff about American poetry—like this book.

There is no better scholarly compendium than The Cambridge History of American Poetry . In its pages, one finds many of the best critics of the last thirty years, absolute authorities, in fine form, distilling their classic takes. For instance, Ed Folsom, who is the editor of The Walt Whitman Archive , covers Whitman. This book also includes emerging scholars and scholar-poets. The sheer variety of topics is stunning. Maybe you’re interested in “Poets of the South”, or in the weird world in which Edgar Allan Poe published, or in poetry’s role in the emergence of first-wave feminism. It’s nice to have a book full of so many nuggets.

While the writers are mostly from the academy, they put away the apparatus of scholarly argument and write really brilliantly. It’s a pleasure to read. You might want to start at the beginning and read all the way through, but I just like to dip in to it whenever I’m wrestling with a poem from a period I might not know that much about.

It’s an interesting fact that some of the best critical work these days comes out in books like the The Cambridge History of American Poetry . Many of the best critics understand that books purchased as reference works are probably going to have more readers than scholarly monographs; the critics give books like this the best that they’ve got.

The editors of this volume note in their introduction that W S Merwin said “We have what might be thought of as a gene pool of poetry by now.” What does he mean?

Next you name an open-access website, the  Emily Dickinson Archive .

The Emily Dickinson Archive is a feat of scholarly effort and a cutting-edge digital project. It’s like Costco, an enormous warehouse for her enormous body of work.

Dickinson never willingly published anything. Fewer than a dozen of her poems saw print in her lifetime. She didn’t ask for them to be printed; friends did. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, often working on many poems at one time, like a painter working on a bunch of canvases or a gardener tending flowers.

You can now buy the collected works of Emily Dickinson, from her  Poems: As She Preserved Them   to collections of her  Letters and even her  Envelope Poems , but it’s better to experience Emily Dickinson through this archive. You can read each poem in her distinctive handwriting, with distinctive punctuation. We no longer live in a world with much handwriting. But penmanship is a form of self-presentation that writers once thought about while crafting their work. Dickinson’s poems work as visual, as well as verbal, art. So this archive allows you to experience her work more fully than would an ordinary anthology.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” You feature an excerpt of this quote of Dickinson’s at the start of your American Poetry series. Why?

The City Lights Books edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems  is your next choice. Why?

I chose two books that deliver a reader into a style and worldview that is completely its own. Great poets create not just a set of discrete poems that say something about the world in which we abide, but a way of looking at the world encoded in their style.

Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems are so much fun. He wrote them during his lunch breaks. What is lunch break? It’s a part of our day when we’re alive and jazzed and hungry for more, probably hungry for lunch, but also hungry for a little leisure, a little stimulation outside the office.

O’Hara writes these poems in a casual voice that’s characteristically his. He called them ‘I do this, I do that’ poems. You follow him around New York City and watch his imagination hunger after and take satisfaction in things. It’s like entering into intimacy with an extraordinary human being.

O’Hara was part of the New York School of poets, allied with Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s and 60s. He was known as “a poet among painters” who often wrote poems in the Cedar Tavern while listening to artists argue and gossip. He was also a critic of mid-century art and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. All of which is a preface to asking: what is poetry’s place in America’s art ecosystem?

Poetry and other arts have been essential to each other at times in their development, including during the moment of Modernism. Modernists were reimaging the form of art, with Cubism, mobiles, and fresh poetic forms. At O’Hara’s height, during the 1950s, avant-garde poets and painters discovered each other and became friends.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III , published in 1977, is the fourth collection you selected. Why?

As I noted, I thought my list should have two volumes of poetry that allow you to enter not just a poet’s work but a poet’s world. The work of Elizabeth Bishop is its own world, that has its own mesmerizing power.

She has become, for many American poets, the 20th-century progenitor. She is the person in the American poetry gene pool who manages to talk about feelings, including uncomfortable feelings, at the deepest registers. Her poetry is highly emotional, she shows a fidelity to experience, an honesty that is not exhibitionistic.

Geography III  was Elizabeth Bishop’s last book. There isn’t a poem in it that isn’t great.

The canon of American poetry—Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, all the way back to Phyllis Wheatley, it seems for every Robert Lowell there’s an Amy Lowell—has a remarkable degree of gender parity. What does the remarkable prominence of female American poets tell us?

Women were cheap. A lot of early American women poets who published did so for very little money; they were happy to appear in print. So, there were economic reasons why American women were published.

The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry , edited by Pulitzer-winning US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, is your final selection.

People who don’t know a lot about poetry, including whether they like it, need a great anthology, that is not so heavy to carry it around. For years I’ve used David Lehman’s  Oxford Book of American Poetry . But Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry brings readers right up to the poets of today; there isn’t another anthology that does that. She devotes about half of its pages to recent poets.

To save room for the poets of today, Dove made the radical decision to reduce selections from the early twentieth century to some representative examples. Rita Dove has a great instinct for the best poetry to lead readers to other poems. What Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens poems prompt readers to find more? Rita Dove chooses them with real skill.

Dove thinks of American poetry as telling the story of who we think we are as Americans. That definition leads Dove to include many poets who were not included in major anthologies before, poets who may not have had access to publication because of their race or class. This anthology offers a more complete picture of American poetry. It’s very compelling and Dove’s introduction is unpretentious and fun to read.

This book generated a lot of dialogue. What is poetry’s agenda, beyond aesthetics?

Limiting the poems given prominence to those that fulfill certain aesthetic criteria leaves to the side too much great work. Readers don’t only read poetry to admire craftsmanship. Poems help us understand who we are, they help us understand our culture. Like Dove, I think of poetry as having a much broader set of functions than simply achieving formal excellence. That is why I value this book.

Poetry reading is on the rise in America, according to a recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Poetry is an art form that is perfect for our digital world. It is accessible, not only though the books I’ve named, but also through websites like the Poetry Foundation . One can have an intense intellectual experience, a deeply pleasurable experience, sometimes a deeply personal experience, with a small portable work of art. Many poems fit into five minutes of spare time. Isn’t it better to read a poem than the your 40th blog of the day? What else refreshes our senses and our sense of the world—and fits on our phone?

February 12, 2019

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Elisa New is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. She is the author of  The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry ( 1992),  The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight  (1999), and  Jacob's Cane   (2009) .   Her latest book is  New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America's First Literature   (2014). Most recently, she is the creator and host of the PBS television series  Poetry in America .

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The Best American Essays: 1999 Hardcover – January 1, 1998

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• Publication date January 1, 1998
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Houghton Mifflin Company (January 1, 1998)
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In 1936, John Gunther predicted the next nine years’ darkness.

A few days after war was declared in September 1939, Winston Churchill sat listening with interest to the much-traveled American journalist John Gunther. Hitler was on the march and Churchill must have had a lot on his mind, but Gunther’s book Inside Europe , first published in 1936, had made him an instant authority on European affairs. Since he had been in Moscow on the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, August 24, 1939, Churchill was keen to get Gunther’s impression of how this stunning, globe-shaking maneuver had been received on the streets of Moscow.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is not known, but what Churchill said to Gunther was memorable. “Russia”, he declared, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would later become famous in a more polished form, was “a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

Gunther’s audience with Churchill was no fluke, no one-off. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther, reporter extraordinary, was probably the most famous American newsman of them all. He was proud to be numbered on the death list kept by Hitler’s Gestapo in Germany, and even more proud of the illustrious company he kept back in the United States. Gunther was a friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.

Gunther made his name with Inside Europe , the huge eve-of-war success that won him his talk with Churchill. But he followed it by assiduously anatomizing the globe, continent by continent, with Inside Asia (1939), Inside Latin America (1941), Inside Africa (1955) and Inside Russia Today (1957). While the later works show signs of being rushed when set beside Inside Europe , they were packed with information and good writing, if not with comparable insight. Gunther remained at least a minor celebrity up until his death at age 68 in May 1970.

Gunther was, after all, one of modern America’s first journalist stars. In his heyday in New York he threw parties at his home for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo. He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with gossip columnists Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and 21. Even so, his books were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

F or all his continuing fame, nothing Gunther wrote after World War II (except perhaps Death Be Not Proud , a memoir about his teenage son’s struggle with a fatal cancer) achieved the success of Inside Europe , a remarkably prescient early warning of what the Nazis had in store for Germany, Europe and the world. Just as a writer like Robert D. Kaplan has in our own day played the role of a modern Cassandra by pointing to the tribalization of politics and the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, in his day Gunther warned of the ugly European forces that were leading step by perilous step to World War II.

April 14, 1958 [credit: Getty Images]

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback, but it sold briskly all the same. It was particularly popular in Great Britain, especially when it first appeared in 1936. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a thumping 500-page hardback retailing at thirty shillings, or sixty times that price. That didn’t slow sales one bit. According to a recent account of its history, in its first year Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about a thousand copies per week and continued to sell during 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over throughout World War II. John Gunther was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success. The first was timing. Appearing in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper & Brothers in the United States, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through thirty regularly updated impressions and several editions, its publishing history climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs, “1938 was Hitler’s year.” It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of the October 1938 “Peace Edition” were able to follow these developments almost as they happened. Not only were they given brilliant thumbnail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (along with a matchless photograph of Herman Göring at a reception, an enormous thug draped with braids and medals confronting a demurely gowned lady from Japan), but there were also incisive studies, accompanied by two dozen photographs, of the whole tragicomic gallery in Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Italy, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Gunther managed also to nail the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As far as the photographs are concerned, the one striking exception to their high illustrative quality overall is the shot of Josef Stalin. This is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing extends to the text in Gunther’s last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—a fact to which we will return in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was that its content had real depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on a dozen years of research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalist colleagues such as Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H.R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer; and on meetings with literary acquaintances like Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther was a master of muckraking American journalism, having grown up in Chicago and having cut his journalistic teeth at the old Chicago Daily News before going off to Europe in 1924. At the end of the 1920s, during a brief visit home to America, he collaborated with James Mulroy at the News on an article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums”, which appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s . It described how on the streets of Chicago you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high as $1,000. In Inside: The Biography of John Gunther (1992), Ken Cuthbertson wrote:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929. . . . It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

The era of Chicago gangsterism turned out to be perfect preparation for understanding European fascism. Indeed, one way to look at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” at how another, somewhat larger—but not proportionally larger—bunch of hoodlums was terrorizing Germany and, before long, the entire continent of Europe. As BBC producer Brian Miller described it in 2001, the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931 for their book, Washington Merry Go Round , successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the United States. Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might usefully be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and a fortunate choice it was. Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating British climate of active censorship and intimidation—“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”, as Miller put it—that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift toward war.

Gunther had been in Vienna since 1930 and had several things going for him. In the first place, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers . . . were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something .” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was both a huge commercial success, finally selling more than half a million copies, and a book that gave him political access everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. In 1941, after returning from Latin America, Gunther was called in by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles to brief President Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided Gunther letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he had found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

As it happened, Roosevelt was less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in edgewise. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.” Seizing his chance when the President paused for breath, Gunther reminded FDR that he was just back from a visit to every country south of the border. “What?” said Roosevelt with a laugh “Even Paraguay?” Gunther had indeed been to Paraguay and had an entertaining tale to tell, but neither Roosevelt nor Welles took much interest in it.

Then Came Duranty

W hen John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924, it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London, Gunther met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and lifelong friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened both his mind and doors into British literary circles. In London, too, Gunther married his first wife, Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944. During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty, an influence on him, unlike that of Hecht, Sandburg, Thompson and West, that proved less than entirely helpful.

Every American who went to Moscow in those days, it seems, met Walter Duranty. Visiting Duranty’s apartment Gunther reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too.

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. The mild irregularity of this arrangement he witnessed was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult. Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex and black magic. Indeed, when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928, he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did, and perhaps he didn’t care, for Duranty was a famous raconteur, and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990), Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later Gunther and his second wife Jane visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. He came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and, according to Jane, Duranty was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until four o’clock in the morning, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp !”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism”, or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again. It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into such things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anybody except the New York Times .

Perhaps. Yet it is inescapable that Duranty’s immediate reward for faithfully covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting the process of American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin himself four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something Duranty quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How did it come to be that someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Parisian bohemian demimonde was the New York Times’ resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did such a man become the best-read authority in the United States on how Stalin was implementing a planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

W hatever the answers to those questions, it is plain that Duranty rubbed off on Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More, I suspect, than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué . Only fiction was prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns or industrial production. Duranty tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels— The Red Pavilion (1926), The Golden Fleece (1963), The Lost City (1964). Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition. When success first came to him, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage and dined beforehand with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Indeed, when Cass Canfield approached him in 1935 to write Inside Europe , Gunther turned him down—twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the then huge sum of $5,000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. Yet when he finally sat down to write, his approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe was to be about their beliefs, motives and charisma.

To get under way, he agreed to produce three articles, and “the three articles”, wrote Gunther years later, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

Such an honest man. We have still today, particularly in America, journalists who aspire to be literary stars, who write books ostensibly of reporting but without the sources required of the journalists’ canon. Gunther admitted his penchant for fiction. Not everyone does.

I nside Europe is still riveting more than seventy years after it was published. His descriptions of Hitler, Léon Blum and so many others strike us today, perhaps, as elegant and as of unerring fidelity. But at the time these descriptions were close to a form of prophecy.

Beyond getting the essence of the major players in the coming war, Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in what was then usually spelled Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace, one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927, the program of the Iron Guard, as Gunther perfectly described it, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

So far so good, and it continues like that for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure, undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told,

Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman.’ When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivization of the peasants had progressed too quickly.

Now this is a gem. The magnanimity of Stalin is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivization had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes, John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain, herded them without food or water onto railway wagons, and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicize. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing American elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism into which much of it had fallen. That such a perceptive—and persuasive—journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about Stalin admits of no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s greatest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or even imagine) that, however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly supportive during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

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Russia Closes File on Three 1999 Bombings

By Steven Lee Myers

• May 1, 2003

The office of Russia's prosecutor general unexpectedly announced today that it had closed its investigation into three apartment bombings in September 1999 that killed 243 people and wounded 1,742 others.

The action provided a subdued coda to the sensational wave of violence that led to the second war in Chechnya, swept Vladimir V. Putin into power and spawned dark tales of conspiracy.

Agreeing with what officials have claimed from the start, prosecutors announced that nine Russian and foreign Islamic fighters carried out the bombings -- two in Moscow and one in the southern city of Volgodonsk -- presumably to advance the separatist movement in Chechnya.

Strikingly, though, none of those accused appeared to be Chechens themselves. Rather, they were Muslim fighters from other regions, which raises questions about Russia's stated reasons for starting the second war in Chechnya only weeks after the bombings.

Today's statement did not explain any motive for the bombings, the reverberations of which are still felt today from here in Moscow to the battered ruins of Chechnya itself.

More than three and a half years after they brought terror to Russia and incited popular opinion against Chechens and other ethnic groups from the Caucasus, the bombings remain a deep and troubling mystery. While dozens of arrests have been made and suspects identified, no one has yet been tried, let alone convicted of direct complicity.

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