Essay: "Once More to the Lake." E. B. White. 1941.

Ten-second review: As an adult, the author returns to the Maine lake where he had spent his childhood summers. He is with his children. He feels the years slipping away. Everything is the same as when he was a child. Almost. Outboard motors are an irritant. And as he watches his young son, he has a premonition of his own death.

Quotes: “I began to sustain the illusion that he [his son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father.” p. 180. ……….

“I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture.” p. 180. ……….

“…saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there have been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor….” p. 186.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay: "The Figure a Poem Makes." Robert Frost. 1939.

10-second review: Frost reflects on the response he has to poems. His most memorable line: "It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

Quote: “…ends in a clarification of life…the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” p. 127.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay: "Knoxville Summer of 1915." James Agee. 1938.

10-second review: Impressions of an idyllic, soft summer night surrounded by family and friends. Told from the point of view of a little boy.

Quote: “Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand.” p. 173.

Comment: Actually part of Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family. Reminds of Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. RayS.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay: "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

Richard Wright. 1937.

10-second review: Learning to live in a white man's world, a world of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Richard Wright and other blacks who endured this cruelty were bitter. This essay is raw with vivid stories and inspires hatred for the Southern whites.

Quote: “Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this, the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.” p. 166.

Comment: The brutality of the black experience told by those who lived it needs to be repeated or read if ever we are able to fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream of the table of brotherhood. Whites have to understand what African-Americans lived with. I chose not to use some of the more graphic stories in my quote. RayS.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay: "Sex ex Machina." James Thurber. 1937.

10-second review: Man vs. technology.

Quote: “At any rate, it has come about that so-called civilized man finds himself today surrounded by the myriad mechanical devices of a technological world…. Still others attribute the whole menace of the machine to sex….”

Comment: Now that line will get your attention. RayS.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay. "The Crack-Up." F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1936.

One-minute review: Reflections on what he now realizes was a nervous breakdown.

Quote: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.” p. 139.

Comment: I think every man—and I did say “man,” not person—has had this experience. RayS.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Essay: "The Old Stone House"

Edmund Wilson. 1932.

10-second review: A trip back to the town of his youth and a mood of depression as it reminds him of a way of life that he would never want to experience again.

Quote: “…no more oil-lamps in the evenings! And I would not go back to that old life if I could: that civilization of northern New York—why should I idealize it?—was too lonely, too poor, too provincial.” p. 128.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.