The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review

This is a strong collection of essays. It took me a while to make my way through them, but there were only a handful that I skipped (mainly because the subject matter just didn't interest me).

The essays are arranged chronologically and touch upon various topics, including politics, sociology, food, art, pop culture, and literature.

Essays included:

- James Agee, The Nation: Democratic Vistas (1945)
- Reinhold Niebuhr, Humor and Faith (1946)
- George F. Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct (1947)
- Edmund Wilson, Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases (1947)
- Walter Lippmann, The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy (1947)
- Robert Warshow, The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1948)
- Harold Rosenberg, The Herd of Independent Minds (1948)
- Robert K. Merton, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1948)
- Leslie Fiedler, Come Back To the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (1948)
- James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village (1953)
- Mary McCarthy, Artists in Uniform (1953)
- Irving Howe, This Age of Conformity (1954)
- E. B. White, Sootfall and Fallout (1956)
- Vladimir Nabokov, On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)
- Saul Bellow, The University as Villain (1957)
- Lionel Trilling, The Last Lover (1958)
- A. J. Liebling, A Good Appetite (1959)
- Seymour Krim, Making It! (1959)
- Elizabeth Hardwick, Boston (1959)
- Flannery O'Connor, Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction (1960)
- John Updike, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (1960)
- Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960)
- Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, (1961)
- Rachel Carson, The Obligation to Endure (1962)
- Norman Mailer, An Evening With Jackie Kennedy (1962)
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
- Philip Roth, Writing About Jews (1963)
- Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” (1964)
- Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
- Paul Goodman, The Universal Trap (1964)
- Tom Wolfe, The Girl of the Year (1964)
- Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965)
- N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
- Gore Vidal, The Twenty-Ninth Republican Convention (1969)
- Albert Murray, The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream (1970)
- Loren Eiseley, One Night's Dying (1970)
- Edward Hoagland, Home is Two Places (1970)
- Joan Didion, On The Morning After The Sixties (1970)