The Best American Essays of the Century

This singular collection is nothing less than a political spiritual and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age as experienced by our foremost critics commentators activists and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.<br> From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail these essays fit in the words of Joyce Carol Oates into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from and who we are and where we are going. Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain John Muir T. S. Eliot Richard Wright Vladimir Nabokov James Baldwin Tom Wolfe Susan Sontag Maya Angelou Alice Walker Joan Didion Cynthia Ozick Saul Bellow Stephen Jay Gould Edward Hoagland and Annie Dillard.