GUEST EDITORS OF
The Best American Essays
1986
1987
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
GAY TALESE
1988
ANNIE DILLARD
1989
GEOFFREY WOLFF
1 9 9 O JUSTIN KAPLAN
1991
JOYCE CAROL OATES
1992
SUSAN SONTAG
1 9 9 3 JOSEPH EPSTEIN
1994
TRACY KIDDER
1 9 9 5 JAMAICA KINCAID
1996
GEOFFREY C. WARD
1997
IAN FRAZIER
1998
CYNTHIA OZICK
1999
EDWARD HOAGLAND
The Best
AMERICAN
ESSAYS
College Edition
Third Edition
Edited and with an Introduction
by ROBERT ATWAN
O
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Credits
"The Telephone" by Anwar F. Accawi. From The Boy from the Tower of the Moon by
Anwar Accawi. Copyright © 1999 by Anwar F. Accawi. Reprinted by permission of
Beacon Press, Boston.
"Hair" by Marcia Aldrich. First published in Northeast Review. Copyright © 1992 by
Marcia Aldrich. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy" by Jacob Cohen. First published in Commentary. Copyright © 1992 byJacob Cohen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Think About It" by Frank Conroy. First published in Harper's Magazine. Copyright
© 1988 by Harper's Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Donadio 8c Ashworth, Inc.
"Shouting Fire" by Alan M. Dershowitz. First published in The Atlantic Monthly.
Copyright © 1989 by Alan Dershowitz. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Who Shot Johnny?" by Debra Dickerson. First published in The New Republic. Copyright © 1996 by Debra Dickerson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Stunt Pilot" by Annie Dillard. First published in Esquire. Copyright © 1989 by
Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Understanding Afrocentrism" by Gerald Early. First published in Civilization.
Copyright © 1995 by Gerald Early. Reprinted by permission of the author.
CREDITS
V
"Spring" by Gretel Ehrlich. First published in Antaeus. Copyright © 1986 by Gretel
Ehrlich. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Spring" also appears in On Nature,
edited by Daniel Halpern and published by North Point Press in 1987.
"A Lovely Sort of Lower Purpose" by Ian Frazier. First published in Outside. Copyright © 1998 by Ian Frazier. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"In the Kitchen" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. From Colored People by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. Copyright © 1994 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reprinted by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc.
"Victoria" by Dagoberto Gilb. First published as "Nice Like a Kiss" in The Washington Post Magazine. Copyright © 1998 by Dagoberto Gilb. Reprinted by permission
of the author.
"The Creation Myth of Cooperstown" by Stephen Jay Gould. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Mirrorings" by Lucy Grealy. First published in Harpers Magazine. Copyright ©
1993 by Lucy Grealy. The essay also served as the basis for the author's book Autobiography of a Face, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of the author and Harpers Magazine.
"A Week in the Word" by Patricia Hampl. Copyright © 1998 by Patricia Hampl.
Originally published in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. Permission to
reprint granted by The Rhoda Weyr Agency, New York.
"What's Wrong with Animal Rights" by Vicki Hearne. First published in expanded
form as "Why Dogs Bark at Mailmen" in Animal Happiness by Vicki Hearne. Copyright © 1994 by Vicki Hearne, HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission
of the author.
"Heaven and Nature" by Edward Hoagland. First published in Harpers Magazine.
Copyright © 1988 by Edward Hoagland. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Heaven and Nature" also appears in the author's collection Hearts Desire: The Best
ofEdward Hoagland, published by Summit Books in 1988.
"No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch" by Ann Hodgman. First published in Spy. Copyright © 1989 by Ann Hodgman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Kubota" by Garrett Hongo. First published in Ploughshares. Copyright © 1990 by
Garrett Hongo. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Salt" by Diana Kappel-Smith. First published in Orion. Copyright © 1994 by Diana
Kappel-Smith. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"On Seeing England for the First Time" byJamaica Kincaid. First published in Transition. Copyright © 1991 byJamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Ring Leader" by Natalie Kusz. Copyright © 1996 by Natalie Kusz. Originally published in Allure, February 1996. Reprinted by permission of Brandt 8c Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.
"The Stone Horse" by Barry Lopez. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright © 1988 by Barry Holstun Lopez.
"Silk Parachute" by John McPhee. Reprinted by permission; Copyright © 1997
John McPhee. Originally published in The New Yorker. All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
IX
1. T H E PERSONAL VOICE: IDENTITY, DIVERSITY, SELF-DISCOVERY •
Contents
A N W A R F. A C C A W I , The Telephone •
29
30
"When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the
terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didn't mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying, or those waiting to appear
in court because they had tampered with the boundary markers on their
land."
PREFACE
XV
MARCIA ALDRICH, Hair •
I N T R O D U C T I O N : E N C O U N T E R I N G T H E ESSAY
•
i
What Are Essays? / Essays and Articles / Essays and Fiction / Essays and
the Writing Process / Can a Computer Evaluate an Essay? / The Essay
and Risk / The Contemporary American Essay: A Diversity of Forms and
Voices / The Essay and Cyberspace
P R O L O G U E : E S S A Y I S T S ON T H E ESSAY
•
14
Justin Kaplan, What Is an Essay? / Jamaica Kincaid, Resisting Definitions /
Ian Frazier, The Essay as Object/ Ian Frazier, The Essay as Action / Annie
Dillard, Essays and the Real World/ Joseph Epstein, No Standard Essay /
Susan Son tag, The Essays Diversity / Joyce Carol Oates, The Memorable
Essay /Justin Kaplan, The Author's Gumption / Cynthia Ozick, Essays and
the Imagination / Cynthia Ozick, Essays Versus Articles / Annie Dillard, Essays Versus Stories / Annie Dillard, Essays Versus Poems / Edward Hoagland,
Essays Are Not Scientific Documents / Susan Sontag, The Essayist's Defensiveness /Joseph Epstein, On Being an Essayist / Geoffrey Wolff, Essayists Must
Tell the Truth / Susan Sontag, The Essayist'sVoice/ Tracy Kidder, The Demands of the First Person Singular/ Geoffrey Wolff, TheuWho Cares?"Factor
/ Edward Hoagland, How the Essayist Acquires Authority /Joseph Epstein,
The Conversational Style / Tracy Kidder, The Attractions of Autobiography /
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Essayist's Audience / Susan Sontag, Essays Start
Out in Magazines / Gay Talese, On Certain Magazine Interviews / Gay
Talese, Listening to People Think / Elizabeth Hardwick, On the Subjects of
Essays / Annie Dillard, The Essay's Unlimited Possibilities
39
"In maturity, I'm incapable of assuming a coherent or consistent philosophy. I have wayward hair: it's always becoming something else."
JUDITH ORTIZ G O F E R , Silent Dancing • 4 7
"The men drank Palo Viejo rum, and some of the younger ones got
weepy. The first time I saw a grown man cry was at a New Year's Eve party:
he had been reminded of his mother by the smells in the kitchen."
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., In the Kitchen • 5 7
"Everybody I knew as a child wanted to have good hair. You could be as
ugly as homemade sin dipped in misery and still be thought attractive if
you had good hair."
DAGOBERTO GILB, Victoria • 6 6
"It was so hot. It was so hot everybody had to say it again and again. So
hot I don't remember if the heat lasted three weeks, a month, two, three.
It was day and night hot, as forever and endless as boredom."
LUCY GREALY, Mirrorings • 7 3
"I once thought that truth was eternal, that when you understood something it was with you forever. I know now that this isn't so, that most
truths are inherendy unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives
to remember the most basic things."
GARRETT HONGO, Kubota • 87
CONTENTS
"He gave his testimony to me and I held it at first cautiously in my conscience like it was an heirloom too delicate to expose to strangers and
anyone outside of the world Kubota made with his words."
CONTENTS
Xi
GRETEL EHRLICH, Spring • 147
NATALIE KUSZ, Ring Leader • 100
"Last spring at this time I was coming out of a bout with pneumonia. I
went to bed on January first and didn't get up until the end of February.
Winter was a cocoon in which my gagging, basso cough shook the dark
figures at the end of my bed."
"The fact is, I grew up ugly — no, worse than that, I grew up unusual,
that unforgivable sin among youth."
IAN F R A Z I E R , A Lovely Sort of Lower Purpose
JOHN MCPHEE, Silk Parachute • 106
"It has been alleged that when I was in college she heard that I had stayed
up all night playing poker and wrote me a letter that used the word
'shame' forty-two times. I do not recall this."
CYNTHIA OZICK, The Break • 110
"Her facts are not my facts. For instance, you will never catch me lying
about my age, which is somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two."
SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, The Inheritance of Tools • 115
"The tools in my workbench are a double inheritance, for each hammer
and level and saw is wrapped in a cloud of knowing."
AMY TAN, Mother Tongue
•
124
is the tool of my trade. And I use them all — all the Englishes
I"Language
grew up with."
•
159
" 'What are you doing? The question pursues me still. When I go fishing
and catch no fish, the idea that it's fun simply to be out on the river consoles me for not one second. I must catch fish; and if I do, I must then
catch more and bigger fish."
PATRICIA
HAMPL,
A Week in the Word • 166
"Praying, chanting the Psalms, draws me out of whatever I might be
thinking or remembering (for so much thinking is remembering, revisiting, rehearsing). I am launched by the Psalms into a memory to which I
belong but which is not mine. I don't possess it; it possesses me."
EDWARD HOAGLAND, Heaven and Nature • 179
"People with sunny natures do seem to live longer than people who are
nervous wrecks; yet mankind didn't evolve out of the animal kingdom by
being unduly sunny-minded."
ANN HODGMAN, No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch
•
194
"I've always wondered about dog food. Is a Gaines-burger really like a
hamburger?"
DIANA KAPPEL-SMITH, Salt • 2OO
"The chemistries of the planet and of our bodies are similar enough (why
should we be amazed?). Our body fluids contain 0.9 percent salt, nowadays,
very likely the exact salinity of whatever ancient sea we managed to crawl out
of, a sea we could leave because we had learned, first of all, to contain it."
ANNIE DILLARD, The Stunt Pilot • 134
"Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our
sleeves and move back theboundariesofthehumanlypossibleonce
more.
BARRY LOPEZ, The Stone Horse • 2 1 1
"I waited until I held his eye. I assured him I would not tell anyone else
how to get there. He looked at me with stoical despair, like a man who
had been robbed twice, whose belief in human beings was offered without conviction."
xii
CONTENTS
JOYCE CAROL OATES, They AllJust Went Away • 2 2 3
"As a woman and a writer, I have long wondered at the wellsprings of female masochism. Or what, in despair of a more subtle, less reductive
phrase, we can call the congeries of predilections toward self-hurt, selferasure, self-repudiation in women."
unfazed by the contradictions and absurdities in their own wantonly selective accounts, often consciously, cunningly deceitful."
GAY TALESE, Ali in Havana
"Education doesn't end until life ends, because you never know when
you're going to understand something you hadn't understood before."
• 236
"The road to Fidel Castro's Palace of the Revolution leads through a
memory lane of old American automobiles chugging along at about
twenty-five miles an hour — springless, pre-embargo Ford coupes and
Plymouth sedans, DeSotos and LaSalles, Nashes and Studebakers, and
various vehicular collages created out of Cadillac grilles and Oldsmobile
axles and Buick fenders patched with pieces of oil-drum metal and powered by engines interlinked with kitchen utensils and pre-Batista lawn
mowers and other gadgets that have elevated the craft of tinkering in
Cuba to the status of high art."
CONTENTS
FRANK C O N R O Y ,
Xlll
Think About It •
ALAN M. D E R S H O W I T Z , Shouting "Fire!" • 3 0 4
"Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's classic example of unprotected
speech — falsely shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater — has been invoked so often, by so many people, in such diverse contexts, that it has
become part of our national folk language."
DEBRA DICKERSON,
LEWIS THOMAS, Crickets, Bats, Cats, & Chaos • 2 5 9
"I have not the slightest notion what goes on in the mind of my cat Jeoffry, beyond the conviction that it is a genuine mind, with genuine
thoughts and a strong tendency to chaos, but in all other respects a mind
totally unlike mine."
JOHN
UPDIKE,
The Disposable Rocket
267
"Inhabiting a male body is much like having a bank account; as long as
it's healthy, you don't think much about it. Compared to the female body,
it is a low-maintenance proposition...."
296
Who Shot Johnny? •
311
"We rarely wonder about or discuss the brother who shot him because we
already know everything about him. When the call came, my first thought
was the same one I'd had when I'd heard about Rosa Parks's beating: A
brother did it."
GERALD EARLY, Understanding Afrocentrism: Why Blacks Dream of a
World Without Whites • 3 1 7
"The issue raised by Afrocentrism is the meaning and formation of identity, which is the major fixation of the American, especially the black
American."
STEPHEN JAY GOULD, The Creation Myths of Cooperstown • 3 3 9
3 . THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ADVOCACY, ARGUMENT, CONTROVERSY •
JACOB COHEN, Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy • 2 7 4
"For nearly thirty years, platoons of conspiracists have concertedly scavenged the record, floating their appalling and thrilling might-have-beens,
"The official story about the beginning of baseball is a creation myth,
and a review of the reasons and circumstances of its fabrication may give
us insight into the cultural appeal of stories in this mode."
VICKI HEARNE, What's Wrong with Animal Rights • 3 5 3
"Animal-rights publications are illustrated largely with photographs of
two kinds of animals — 'Helpless Fluff and 'Agonized Fluff,' the two conditions in which some people seem to prefer their animals, because any
other version of an animal is too complicated for propaganda."
xiv
J A M A I C A K I N C A I D , On Seeing England
CONTENTS
for the First Time - 3 6 4
"When my teacher had pinned this map up on the blackboard, she said,
'This is England' — and she said it with authority, seriousness, and adoration, and we all sat up. It was as if she had said, 'This is Jerusalem, the
place you will go to when you die but only if you have been good.'"
THOMAS PALMER, The Casefor Human Beings • 3 7 6
"An argument, a human argument, maintains that we ought to be concerned about the disappearance of individual animal species."
Preface
SUSAN SONTAG, A Century of Cinema • 3 8 8
"The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attentiongrabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't
demand anyone's full attention."
SHELBY STEELE, On Being Black and Middle Class • 3 9 5
"Black though I may be, it is impossible for me to sit in my single-family
house with two cars in the driveway and a swing set in the back yard and
not see the role class has played in my life."
JOY WILLIAMS, The Killing Game • 4 0 9
"To kill is to put to death, extinguish, nullify, cancel, destroy. But from
the hunter's point of view, it's just a tiny part of the experience."
ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENTS • 4 2 5
RHETORICAL MODES • 4 2 7
SOME LITERARY AND JOURNALISTIC TECHNIQUES • 4 3 O
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES • 4 3 2
INDEX OF AUTHORS • 4 3 5
What Is The Best American Essays Series?
Back in the 1970s Edward Hoagland wondered why no one compiled an annual collection of the year's best essays, especially since
comparable short story volumes had been around for decades. I
agreed with Hoagland, and after a few false starts (I thought at
first of calling the series "The E. B. White Awards" and later "The
Emerson Awards"), I founded The Best American Essays as a companion volume to Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories. The first volume was published in 1986. Since then, the series
has grown in popularity; each year more and more readers seem
drawn to the vitality and versatility of the contemporary American
essay.
For readers unfamiliar with the series, a brief introduction may
be useful. As the series editor, I screen hundreds of essays from an
enormous variety of general, specialized, and literary magazines. I
then turn over a large number of candidates to a guest editor, a
prominent American writer, who makes the final selection of approximately twenty essays. To qualify for selection, the essays must
be works of high literary quality intended as fully developed, independent essays on subjects of general interest, originally written in
English for first appearance in an American periodical during a
calendar year. In general, selections for the book are included on
the basis of literary achievement: they must be admirably written
and demonstrate an awareness of craft as well as a forcefulness of
thought. Since each guest editor, of course, possesses a different
idea about what comprises a fine essay, each book also represents