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The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Paperback – January 15, 1995
Purchase options and add-ons
- Reading age1 year and up
- Print length777 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure1180L
- Dimensions6.2 x 2 x 9.2 inches
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJanuary 15, 1995
- ISBN-10038542339X
- ISBN-13978-0385423397
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Without a doubt, this is the most nourishing essay collection I've read in years." -- Susan Burmeister-Brown, Portland Oregonian.
"A labor of deeply felt love and keenly honed scholarship by an essay authority who knows his territory down to his bones." -- Christian Science Monitor.
"The best available [essay anthology] no matter how crowded the field." -- Chicago Tribune.
"The striking thing is how much Lopate has managed to pack in, and how high a standard he has managed to maintain." -- John Gross, New York Newsday.
"Packed with personality and beguiling first-person prose... of reminders of the perils and pleasures of the craft." -- The Wall Street Journal.
From the Publisher
"A wonderful book. The most charming smorgasbord imaginable of essays from around the world." -- Diane Cole, USA Today.
"Without a doubt, this is the most nourishing essay collection I've read in years." -- Susan Burmeister-Brown, Portland Oregonian.
"A labor of deeply felt love and keenly honed scholarship by an essay authority who knows his territory down to his bones." -- Christian Science Monitor.
"The best available [essay anthology] no matter how crowded the field." -- Chicago Tribune.
"The striking thing is how much Lopate has managed to pack in, and how high a standard he has managed to maintain." -- John Gross, New York Newsday.
"Packed with personality and beguiling first-person prose... of reminders of the perils and pleasures of the craft." -- The Wall Street Journal.
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Seneca the Younger (c. A.D. 3-65) was born in Córdoba, Spain, about the same time as Christ; his father, Seneca the Elder, was an accomplished rhetorician and writer. Seneca went to Rome to study philosophy and rhetoric and became a renowned orator and writer himself. He also took up the philosophy of Stoicism, which counseled that perfection and contentment could be reached through reason, simple living, indifference to pain and death, and social equality. To the Stoics, a wise man was one who played the cards that were dealt him, uncomplainingly and with dignity, whether a slave or a king.
Exiled by the emperor Claudius, who was said to fear the philosopher's growing popularity, Seneca was recalled eight years later in triumph to become the young Nero's tutor. His influence over Nero was, at least initially, salutary; for a while, the emperor's tutor and the military leader Burrus ruled Rome together harmoniously behind the scenes. But eventually Nero's cruel propensities revealed themselves: he killed his mother, his brother, and, after Seneca was again sent into exile, his tutor; that is, he demanded that Seneca kill himself, and the old man obliged. The nobility with which Seneca took his life was much admired, and was considered an apt demonstration of his philosophy, suicide being a Stoic virtue. However, he was often criticized for the disparity between his Stoic beliefs and his practices in other respects: he amassed enormous wealth, curried favor, and even whined at misfortune--he acted, in short, like a human being instead of a paragon of virtue.
Seneca was a prolific author of tragedies (which strongly influenced Elizabethan drama), dialogues, and orations, but his reputation as the founder of the essay rests on his letters, which both Montaigne and Bacon cited as their inspiration and which remain his most attractive and accessible work. Essays in disguise, these "moral letters," written during Seneca's last exile, were probably intended from the start for publication rather than for their ostensible recipient, a civil servant named Lucilius. Each has a homiletic, ethical, Stoic message to convey. In them, a portrait of Seneca also emerges: asthmatic, aging, wry, alternately crabby and serene, critical of hypocrisy and luxury, observant of manners and mores (we learn much from him about Roman daily life), argumentative, worldly.
In his style Seneca stressed brevity and clarity. Reacting in part against Cicero's "grand style," a beautiful but wordy, florid oratory that rounded out sentences on the basis of sound, Seneca developed a more clipped, epigrammatic manner known as the humble or familiar style, which used common language and relied more heavily on metaphor, antithesis, and wit. Since writing in Seneca's time was often read aloud and drew applause at "points"--witty turns of phrase--it tended to devolve into aphoristic series. The results can be both dazzling and fatiguing. Macauley once complained that Seneca's "works are made up of mottoes. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce." The paradox of Seneca's style is that it is at once simpler, more plainspoken than Cicero's and more baroque, contorted under brevity's lash. A virtue of his jerky, abrupt manner is that it gives the impression of a mind in action--thought, counterthought, without any smoothing over the bumps. Its importance to us here is that it affected the development of the essay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when classicism had returned and the reigning academic model was the euphonious Cicero. The anti-Ciceronians, such as Bacon, Montaigne, and Lipsius, led a rebellion, taking Seneca as their model, and out of it came modern prose: quick, pungent, ironic, self-questioning, reflective of mental process. It all goes back to Seneca.
On Noise
I cannot for the life of me see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be. Here am I with a babel of noise going on all about me. I have lodgings right over a public bathhouse. Now imagine to yourself every kind of sound that can make one weary of one's years. When the strenuous types are doing their exercises, swinging weight-laden hands about, I hear the grunting as they toil away--or go through the motions of toiling away--at them, and the hissings and strident gasps every time they expel their pent-up breath. When my attention turns to a less active fellow who is contenting himself with an ordinary inexpensive massage, I hear the smack of a hand pummelling his shoulders, the sound varying according as it comes down flat or cupped. But if on top of this some ball player comes along and starts shouting out the score, that's the end! Then add someone starting up a brawl, and someone else caught thieving, and the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, and the people who leap into the pool with a tremendous splash. Apart from those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of the hair remover, continually giving vent to his shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence, never silent unless it be while he is plucking someone's armpits and making the client yell for him! Then think of the various cries of the man selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling pastries, and all the ones hawking for the catering shops, each publicizing his wares with a distinctive cry of his own.
"You must be made of iron," you may say, "or else hard of hearing if your mind is unaffected by all this babel of discordant noises around you, when continual 'good morning' greetings were enough to finish off the Stoic Chrysippus!" But I swear I no more notice all this roar of noise than I do the sound of waves or falling water--even if I am here told the story of a people on the Nile who moved their capital solely because they could not stand the thundering of a cataract! Voices, I think, are more inclined to distract one than general noise; noise merely fills one's ears, battering away at them while voices actually catch one's attention. Among the things which create a racket all around me without distracting me at all I include the carriages hurrying by in the street, the carpenter who works in the same block, a man in the neighbourhood who saws, and this fellow tuning horns and flutes at the Trickling Fountain and emitting blasts instead of music. I still find an intermittent noise more irritating than a continuous one. But by now I have so steeled myself against all these things that I can even put up with a coxswain's strident tones as he gives his oarsmen the rhythm. For I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam without so long as there is no commotion within, so long as fear and desire are not at loggerheads, so long as meanness and extravagance are not at odds and harassing each other. For what is the good of having silence throughout the neighbourhood if one's emotions are in turmoil?
The peaceful stillness of the night had lulled
The world to rest.*
This is incorrect. There is no such thing as "peaceful stillness" except where reason has lulled it to rest. Night does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even when people are asleep they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind. Look at the man whose quest for sleep demands absolute quiet from his spacious house. To prevent any sound disturbing his ears every one of his host of slaves preserves total silence and those who come anywhere near him walk on tip-toe. Naturally enough he tosses from side to side, trying to snatch some fitful sleep in between the spells of fretting, and complains of having heard sounds when he never heard them at all. And what do you suppose is the reason? His mind is in a ferment. It is this which needs to be set at peace. Here is the mutiny that needs to be suppressed. The fact that the body is lying down is no reason for supposing that the mind is at peace. Rest is sometimes far from restful. Hence our need to be stimulated into general activity and kept occupied and busy with pursuits of the right nature whenever we are victims of the sort of idleness that wearies of itself. When great military commanders notice indiscipline among their men they suppress it by giving them some work to do, mounting expeditions to keep them actively employed. People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.
We commonly give the impression that the reasons for our having gone into political retirement are our disgust with public life and our dissatisfaction with some uncongenial and unrewarding post. Yet every now and then ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired--or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success. I would say the same about extravagant living, which appears on occasion to have left one and then, when one has declared for the simple life, places temptation in the way. In the middle of one's programme of frugality it sets out after pleasures which one had discarded but not condemned, its pursuit of them indeed being all the more ardent the less one is aware of it. For when they are in the open vices invariably take a more moderate form; diseases too are on the way towards being cured when once they have broken out, instead of being latent, and made their presence felt. So it is with the love of money, the love of power and the other maladies that affect the minds of men--you may be sure that it is when they abate and give every appearance of being cured that they are at their most dangerous. We give the impression of being in retirement, and are nothing of the kind. For if we are genuine in this, if we have sounded the retreat and really turned away from the surface show, then, as I was saying a little while ago, nothing will distract us. Men and birds together in full chorus will never break into our thinking when that thinking is good and has at last come to be of a sure and steady character.
The temperament that starts at the sound of a voice or chance noises in general is an unstable one and one that has yet to attain inward detachment. It has an element of uneasiness in it, and an element of the rooted fear that makes a man a prey to anxiety, as in the description given by our Virgil:
And I, who formerly would never flinch
At flying spears or serried ranks of Greeks,
Am now alarmed by every breeze and roused
By every sound to nervousness, in fear
For this companion and this load alike.*
The earlier character here is the wise man, who knows no fear at the hurtling of missiles, or the clash of weapons against weapons in the close-packed ranks, or the thunderous noise of a city in destruction. The other, later one has everything to learn; fearing for his belongings he pales at every noise; a single cry, whatever it is, prostrates him, being immediately taken for the yelling of the enemy; the slightest movement frightens him out of his life; his baggage makes him a coward. Pick out any one of your "successful" men, with all they trail or carry about with them, and you will have a picture of the man "in fear for this companion and this load." You may be sure, then, that you are at last "lulled to rest" when noise never reaches you and when voices never shake you out of yourself, whether they be menacing or inviting or just a meaningless hubbub of empty sound all round you.
"This is all very well," you may say, "but isn't it sometimes a lot simpler just to keep away from the din?" I concede that, and in fact it is the reason why I shall shortly be moving elsewhere. What I wanted was to give myself a test and some practice. Why should I need to suffer the torture any longer than I want to when Ulysses found so easy a remedy for his companions even against the Sirens?*
Asthma
Ill health--which had granted me quite a long spell of leave--has attacked me without warning again. "What kind of ill health?" you'll be asking. And well you may, for there isn't a single kind I haven't experienced. There's one particular ailment, though, for which I've always been singled out, so to speak. I see no reason why I should call it by its Greek name,** difficulty in breathing being a perfectly good way of describing it. Its onslaught is of very brief duration--like a squall, it is generally over within the hour. One could hardly, after all, expect anyone to keep on drawing his last breath for long, could one? I've been visited by all the troublesome or dangerous complaints there are, and none of them, in my opinion, is more unpleasant than this one--which is hardly surprising, is it, when you consider that with anything else you're merely ill, while with this you're constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it "rehearsing death," since sooner or later the breath does just what it has been trying to do all those times. Do you imagine that as I write this I must be feeling in high spirits at having escaped this time? No, it would be just as absurd for me to feel overjoyed at its being over--as if this meant I was a healthy man again--as it would be for a person to think he has won his case on obtaining an extension of time before trial.
Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections. "What's this?" I said. "So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself." "When was this?" you'll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. If there is any torment in the later state, there must also have been torment in the period before we saw the light of day; yet we never felt conscious of any distress then. I ask you, wouldn't you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquillity. For, unless I'm mistaken, we are wrong, my dear Lucilius, in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin, when the result of either is that you do not exist?
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; First Edition (January 15, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 777 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038542339X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385423397
- Reading age : 1 year and up
- Lexile measure : 1180L
- Item Weight : 2.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.2 x 2 x 9.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #24,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Rhetoric (Books)
- #49 in Essays (Books)
- #169 in Short Stories Anthologies
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers find the book's essays interesting and helpful for personal essayists. They praise the writing quality as excellent, wonderful, and a great resource for those studying writing. The stories are organized by author, theme, or subject and found entertaining.
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Customers find the book's variety of essays interesting and helpful. They say it's a great resource for personal essayists, with fine-to-excellent American essays from Seneca to Thurber. The format is a lovely way to teach food addicts about how to recover. Readers praise the book as informative, instructive, and entertaining.
"This is a nice, thick books of essays, dating back centuries up through contemporaries." Read more
"...The editor, Philip Lopate, is one of the most well-respected authors of the personal essay and he has compiled this anthology of pieces from the..." Read more
"...The author gives an excellent overview of the personal essay as a genre -- how the essay is put together, why it works, what makes it so charming..." Read more
"...assigned it for a class in personal essay it city contains many fine examples of the genre but lacks any significant aid in " how to." For..." Read more
Customers find the book easy to read with excellent writing and stories. They say it's an excellent resource for studying writing, with clear print that makes it easy to use as examples for beginning writers. The book works well for readers and writers alike, providing great examples and clear instructions.
"...The book works well for readers and writers alike...." Read more
"...-- how the essay is put together, why it works, what makes it so charming and interesting...." Read more
"...I didn't read the whole thing, only some selections, but it was a good read." Read more
"Wonderful writing in the personal essay format by writers from Seneca to Thurber, from Montaigne to Orwell, on subjects that are all over the map...." Read more
Customers enjoy the stories in the book. They find the writing excellent and the collection of contemporary nonfiction writers interesting. The stories are organized by author, theme, or subject for easy reading. Readers also appreciate the entertaining essays.
"...essay is put together, why it works, what makes it so charming and interesting...." Read more
"...Stories are also organized in beginning by author, theme or subject." Read more
"...Lots of big names in here. Excellent writing, wonderful stories." Read more
"...I love the essays they are very entertaining!" Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2024This is a nice, thick books of essays, dating back centuries up through contemporaries.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2004Laurie Stone, the essayist and creative writing teacher, recommended this book to me as the most essential volume on the personal essay. I could not agree more. The editor, Philip Lopate, is one of the most well-respected authors of the personal essay and he has compiled this anthology of pieces from the classical era to the present. The book works well for readers and writers alike. Lopate, in his lengthy introduction, gives an overview of the personal essay, and instructions on how to use this book as a learning tool. It is divided into several sections, beginning with the essay's forerunners in the classical period. Michel De Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, gets his own section. Personally, I did not find it useful to read the book cover-to-cover - I read it in reverse. I started out with the most recent, contemporary essays - those most accessible to me - and went backwards in order to see the devolution of the essay, as it were.
The essay is fast becoming one of my favorite forms - it is short, funny, and insightful. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2012The introduction itself is invaluable. The author gives an excellent overview of the personal essay as a genre -- how the essay is put together, why it works, what makes it so charming and interesting. I've studied this intro closely and have strongly recommended it to my writer friends. In fact, I loaned my original copy of this book to someone in April but soon bought another because I didn't want to be without it until I see the person again in July. A reading treat, all the way through.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2010I bought this for summer reading assignments for my high school. I thought it was going to be a boring collection of essays but it surprised me. I didn't read the whole thing, only some selections, but it was a good read.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2010The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present is a teachers and writers collaborative book expounding the personal essay. Lopate believes intimacy is the hallmark of the personal essay, with "the writer seemingly speaking directly into the reader's ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom." This intimacy invites the reader into a relationship of shared thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsy. This relationship is based on a belief that at our core we have a common experience of what it means to be human; a common anxiety, a common drive for understanding and companionship. This definition gives me fresh cause to study personal essay as a form for story and to try my hand at it. I believe our commonness is what draws us into relationship with one another, our understanding of the divine, and our own souls. Personal essay can be the vehicle to help us tell all, argue all, and laugh along the way. I like this. I like this very much. Lopate gives each an invitation to write our own personal essay.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2023This review is for the seller Chestnut Hill Books. The book was packaged very nicely. Unlike Amazon nowadays, this book was wrapped and put in a box to prevent from damage. Item received in top shape. However, it will take a while to read this book as it is a pretty thick book.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2015Emily Gordon assigned it for a class in personal essay it city contains many fine examples of the genre but lacks any significant aid in " how to." For some, you k know it when you see it may be sufficient but not me.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2019Wonderful writing in the personal essay format by writers from Seneca to Thurber, from Montaigne to Orwell, on subjects that are all over the map. I skipped around during a week at the beach and couldn't have been more inspired and eager to keep reading.
Top reviews from other countries
- Subho DeepReviewed in India on September 28, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Go-to reference book for Essayists
A wonderful compilation of classic essays. If anyone is trying to hone their essay writing skills, this book is the go-to reference. I am thoroughly enjoying reading this book.
- David HReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive anthology of essays!
This book is the definitive collection of essays that will prove a valuable read to students of literature and the wider public alike. It includes essays from antiquity through to modernity, and serves as an interesting means of assessing the ebbs and flows of various cultures over time.
The editor, Phillip Lopate, is known as both a teacher and author of the personal essays, and has compiled some of the best examples of the form throughout history. A particular joy is his lengthy introduction, which sets out to describe the nature of the essay and provide some preliminary guidance on how to use the book as a learning resource.
This book has proven interesting to read in its own right – including topics as diverse as food, sex, nature and illness – and as a means of developing myself as an essayist. The selected essays, diverse as they are, are unfailing in the joy they bring to read and the insights they deliver. This anthology deserves a place on everyone’s bookshelf and I could not recommend it enough.
If you found this review useful in any way I’d be super grateful if you clicked the “helpful” button below to let me know :)
David H
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2019
The editor, Phillip Lopate, is known as both a teacher and author of the personal essays, and has compiled some of the best examples of the form throughout history. A particular joy is his lengthy introduction, which sets out to describe the nature of the essay and provide some preliminary guidance on how to use the book as a learning resource.
This book has proven interesting to read in its own right – including topics as diverse as food, sex, nature and illness – and as a means of developing myself as an essayist. The selected essays, diverse as they are, are unfailing in the joy they bring to read and the insights they deliver. This anthology deserves a place on everyone’s bookshelf and I could not recommend it enough.
If you found this review useful in any way I’d be super grateful if you clicked the “helpful” button below to let me know :)
Images in this review - QuiqueReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars A genre of its own
This book really makes the personal essay stand as a genre, a very fruitful one. To witness the free and surprising development of the mind of each writer is a joy of the personal essays compiled and introduced by Lopate.
- T. GowReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars A keeper!
What's not to love. A well curated smorgasbord of personal essays from old to new. A book to dip into and enjoy.
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Canada on May 29, 2024
4.0 out of 5 stars Hefty tome!
The book was recommended to me because I am interested in the topic “The Art of the Personal Essay” by Phillip Lopate. Did not realize the size. Fine with a used copy.