Select your cookie preferences
We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie notice . We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements.
If you agree, we'll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie notice . Your choice applies to using first-party and third-party advertising cookies on this service. Cookies store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. The 96 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Click "Decline" to reject, or "Customise" to make more detailed advertising choices, or learn more. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences , as described in the Cookie notice. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy notice .
- Poetry, Drama & Criticism
- History & Criticism
- Literary Theory & Movements
Buy new: £23.71
Amazon global store.
- International products have separate terms, are sold from abroad and may differ from local products, including fit, age ratings, and language of product, labeling or instructions.
- Manufacturer warranty will not apply. Please review Amazon’s return policy, which usually offers free returns within 30 days of receipt.
- Learn more about Amazon Global Store.
| This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different delivery location. |
Sorry, there was a problem.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
- To view this video download Flash Player
Follow the author
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Hardcover – 1 Feb. 1994
Purchase options and add-ons.
- Print length 777 pages
- Language English
- Publisher Anchor Books
- Publication date 1 Feb. 1994
- Dimensions 17.15 x 5.08 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-10 0385422989
- ISBN-13 978-0385422987
- See all details
Product description
From the inside flap, product details.
- Publisher : Anchor Books (1 Feb. 1994)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 777 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385422989
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385422987
- Dimensions : 17.15 x 5.08 x 24.13 cm
- 10,635 in Essays, Journals & Letters
About the author
Phillip lopate.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 74%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 13%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 8%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 5%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Reviews with images
- Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..
Top reviews from other countries
- UK Modern Slavery Statement
- Amazon Science
- Sell on Amazon
- Sell on Amazon Business
- Sell on Amazon Handmade
- Associates Programme
- Fulfilment by Amazon
- Seller Fulfilled Prime
- Advertise Your Products
- Independently Publish with Us
- Host an Amazon Hub
- › See More Make Money with Us
- The Amazon Barclaycard
- Credit Card
- Amazon Money Store
- Amazon Currency Converter
- Payment Methods Help
- Shop with Points
- Top Up Your Account
- Top Up Your Account in Store
- COVID-19 and Amazon
- Track Packages or View Orders
- Delivery Rates & Policies
- Returns & Replacements
- Manage Your Content and Devices
- Amazon Mobile App
- Customer Service
- Accessibility
- Conditions of Use & Sale
- Privacy Notice
- Cookies Notice
- Interest-Based Ads Notice
- Education & Reference
- Words, Language & Grammar
- Amazon international products are subject to separate terms and conditions and are sold from abroad by foreign sellers. Amazon’s products may differ from versions available in Canada, including configuration, age rating, product language, labelling and instructions.
- The manufacturer’s warranty may not be valid in Canada.
Sorry, there was a problem.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
- To view this video, download Flash Player
Follow the author
The Art of the Personal Essay Hardcover – Jan. 1 1994
Purchase options and add-ons.
- Print length 777 pages
- Language English
- Publisher Doubleday
- Publication date Jan. 1 1994
- Dimensions 17.15 x 5.08 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-10 0385422989
- ISBN-13 978-0385422987
- See all details
Frequently bought together
Popular titles by this author
Product description
From library journal, from the publisher.
"Packed with personality and beguiling first-person prose... of reminders of the perils and pleasures of the craft." -- The Wall Street Journal .
From the Back Cover
Product details.
- Publisher : Doubleday; First Edition (Jan. 1 1994)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 777 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385422989
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385422987
- Item weight : 567 g
- Dimensions : 17.15 x 5.08 x 24.13 cm
- #772 in Rhetoric (Books)
- #21,186 in Foreign Languages (Books)
About the author
Phillip lopate.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 74%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 13%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 8%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 5%
- Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews
Top reviews from Canada
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..
Top reviews from other countries
- Amazon and Our Planet
- Modern Slavery Statement
- Investor Relations
- Press Releases
- Amazon Science
- Sell on Amazon
- Supply to Amazon
- Become an Affiliate
- Protect & Build Your Brand
- Sell on Amazon Handmade
- Advertise Your Products
- Independently Publish with Us
- Host an Amazon Hub
- Amazon.ca Rewards Mastercard
- Shop with Points
- Reload Your Balance
- Amazon Currency Converter
- Amazon Cash
- Shipping Rates & Policies
- Amazon Prime
- Returns Are Easy
- Manage your Content and Devices
- Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
- Registry & Gift List
- Customer Service
- Conditions of Use
- Privacy Notice
- Interest-Based Ads
- Amazon.com.ca ULC | 40 King Street W 47th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5H 3Y2 |1-877-586-3230
We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!
Internet Archive Audio
- This Just In
- Grateful Dead
- Old Time Radio
- 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
- Audio Books & Poetry
- Computers, Technology and Science
- Music, Arts & Culture
- News & Public Affairs
- Spirituality & Religion
- Radio News Archive
- Flickr Commons
- Occupy Wall Street Flickr
- NASA Images
- Solar System Collection
- Ames Research Center
- All Software
- Old School Emulation
- MS-DOS Games
- Historical Software
- Classic PC Games
- Software Library
- Kodi Archive and Support File
- Vintage Software
- CD-ROM Software
- CD-ROM Software Library
- Software Sites
- Tucows Software Library
- Shareware CD-ROMs
- Software Capsules Compilation
- CD-ROM Images
- ZX Spectrum
- DOOM Level CD
- Smithsonian Libraries
- FEDLINK (US)
- Lincoln Collection
- American Libraries
- Canadian Libraries
- Universal Library
- Project Gutenberg
- Children's Library
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Books by Language
- Additional Collections
- Prelinger Archives
- Democracy Now!
- Occupy Wall Street
- TV NSA Clip Library
- Animation & Cartoons
- Arts & Music
- Computers & Technology
- Cultural & Academic Films
- Ephemeral Films
- Sports Videos
- Videogame Videos
- Youth Media
Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.
Mobile Apps
- Wayback Machine (iOS)
- Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
Archive-it subscription.
- Explore the Collections
- Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.
Please enter a valid web address
- Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
The Art of the personal essay : an anthology from the classical era to the present
Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.
- Graphic Violence
- Explicit Sexual Content
- Hate Speech
- Misinformation/Disinformation
- Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
- Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata
![[WorldCat (this item)]](https://archive.org/images/worldcat-small.png "[WorldCat (this item)]")
plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews
1,163 Views
67 Favorites
Better World Books
DOWNLOAD OPTIONS
No suitable files to display here.
IN COLLECTIONS
Uploaded by station11.cebu on January 20, 2020
SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)
Phillip Lopate Celebrates the Personal Essay
(and recommends six great essayists he really thinks you should read)
O ne day in the 1980s, the writer Phillip Lopate ’64CC stood before the bookcase of a vacation home he had rented for the summer, looking for something to read. His eyes fell on a volume by William Hazlitt, and though Lopate wasn’t deeply familiar with the Romantic Age essayist and critic, he pulled the book from the shelf and carried it outside to a hammock. Instantly, he became immersed in Hazlitt’s forthright, conversational voice. Hazlitt led Lopate to Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s close friend and a distinguished essayist himself. Both these Englishmen referred often to Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer who is credited with inventing the modern essay and giving it its name (which derives from the French verb essayer , or “to try”). “By the time I got to Montaigne,” Lopate says, “I was completely hooked on the form.”
Thirty years later, Lopate, who is the director of the nonfiction concentration in the graduate writing program at Columbia’s School of the Arts, sits in his light-filled four-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and speaks about the personal essay — the literary form of which he is a leading practitioner, advocate, and connoisseur.
Lopate, seventy-two, has worked hard to get this underappreciated form embraced not merely within the academy (long dominated by poetry, drama, and fiction), but also, perhaps more improbably, in bookstores and on bestseller lists. Meghan Daum, Leslie Jamison, John Jeremiah Sullivan, John D’Agata, and a host of other writers who’ve recently published popular personal-essay collections owe at least a modicum of their success to this man.
Lopate doesn’t disagree with that assessment (“There are far more essayists and the essay is definitely more popular today than it was thirty years ago, and I’ll take a little credit for that”), but he also believes that the genre is uniquely suited to the times we live in. The rise of digital media has brought with it a flood of sharing and storytelling in the form of blogs, and in an era of ever-briefer attention spans, “an essay is short and rarely takes more than an hour to read.”
“There’s also the fact that this form is comfortable with skepticism, doubt, and self-doubt,” says Lopate. “Instead of lecturing you, it invites you into the pathways of the mind of a writer who’s examining, testing, and speculating. As [German social theorist Theodor] Adorno said, the essay isn’t responsible for solving anything. And that suits an historical moment that’s filled with uncertainty and mistrust of dogmatism.”
Lopate had always been fond of first-person narration, both in his writing (fiction, poetry, and the memoir-like pieces he began publishing in the 1970s) and in his reading. “I loved Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’” he says. “The narrator didn’t have to be reliable or even likable; he or she just had to be lively.” So, naturally, when he encountered the confiding, distinctive voices of essayists like Hazlitt, Lamb, and Montaigne, he began to seek out similar writers, for the pure pleasure of their company. His discovery of these past masters of the essay deepened his interest in the form and its roots, and he began teaching the personal essay in his literature courses at the University of Houston, where he was a faculty member from 1980 to 1988. But when he started scouring the book catalogs for an anthology to assign his students, he found nothing suitable. “There were collections of contemporary works, but there was nothing historical, nothing that suggested the canon going all the way back.” Now Lopate had a mission: “It was up to me to produce the anthology I was looking for.”
He got a contract for that collection, and the result, published in 1994, was The Art of the Personal Essay , which takes the reader from the ancient musings of Seneca and Plutarch to the modern ones of Annie Dillard and Gore Vidal. The book has been widely adopted by colleges and universities, for use in survey courses as well as courses that focus specifically on the essay. And thus did this Rodney Dangerfield of genres (“The essay has been considered minor even though it’s an ancient, distinguished form,” Lopate says) assume its rightful place in academia. Lopate’s collection follows the development of the essay as it becomes ever more elastic, expanding to encompass personality-suffused criticism as well as the “new journalism” of the sixties and seventies, as practiced by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer.
Lopate embraces such eclecticism and is not the least bit doctrinaire in his tastes. In evaluating an essay — whether he’s reading it for work or pleasure — his only yardsticks are his own enthusiasm and the sparkle of the prose. As it happens, his enthusiasms run both deep and broad, accommodating writers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche and Nora Ephron. He asks only that a writer be entertaining and honest. As for sparkling prose, it’s easy to recognize but difficult to define. Nonetheless, Lopate believes it can be broken down into three key components: 1) an element of surprise, in that each sentence ends in a different place than you thought it would; 2) textured language, with buzzes and quirks created by the placement of interesting words next to other interesting words; and 3) a density of thought, with no dumbing down and an implicit awareness of the essay’s long literary tradition.
Still, as catholic as his tastes are, Lopate, like every passionate reader, has certain predilections that lead him to favor some writers and types of writing over others. “We all bring our own backgrounds to our reading,” he says, “and we tend to respond more to work that resonates with our own experience.” Lopate admits, for example, that he cannot fully appreciate even as highly influential and gifted an essayist as David Foster Wallace, partly because he is made uncomfortable and slightly anxious by Wallace’s “confusion and neurosis.” (“There was a lot of nuttiness in my family,” Lopate says.) Although his students look up to Wallace as “this brilliant eccentric, a sort of Kurt Cobain of literature,” Lopate says, “I can’t have that same relationship to him because I’m older than Wallace, and in my own reading I’m drawn to authors who seem wiser than I am. I don’t want the experience of reading somebody who’s tormented. That sounds very narrow of me, but on some level I’m still looking for wisdom when I read.”
He’s also partial to contrarians, and can rattle off a list of favorite works with “against” in their titles: Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation ; Joyce Carol Oates’s “Against Nature”; the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s “Against Poets”; Laura Kipnis’s Against Love (“She says love is a kind of bully”); Lopate’s own Against Joie de Vivre . “These are perverse positions,” he says. “How can someone be against such things? But I like these paradoxes because they’re a way of introducing doubt. In a period where there’s a lot of orthodoxy around political correctness, it becomes risky but enticing to interrogate your own prejudices, your own lack of sympathy — to try to tell some truth instead of pretending that you’re universally sympathetic.”
Ultimately, the all-encompassing nature of the essay may hold the key to its staying power. Lopate points to two main traditions in essay writing. “There are the essayists like Charles Lamb, who are always dilating over something daily and minor,” he says, “and then there are those like George Orwell and James Baldwin, who are grappling with the major themes of the day.” Like the novel, the essay can engage with any topic imaginable. “Nothing is off-limits — the essay can absorb theology and science and philosophy, as well as experience. It’s a very capacious literary form, and I believe absolutely that it will endure.”
But who and what, amid a multitude of options, should an eager reader tackle first? Columbia Magazine put the question to Lopate: which six essayists do you recommend that everyone read? Given the wealth of material, limiting Lopate to such a small number seemed almost sadistic. So to narrow the field, we added parameters: stick to modern-day essayists (twentieth and twenty-first century) writing in English, and choose distinct voices that in no way duplicate one another.
Lopate’s final list is a lot like a terrific essay — quirky, unpredictable, and highly individual.
Max Beerbohm
British, 1872–1956
Lopate’s take: For me, wisdom is often found in humor, so I naturally gravitate toward a comic writer like Beerbohm, an essayist who was also a brilliant caricaturist. From my first reading of Beerbohm — whom I discovered after I came across Virginia Woolf’s mention of him as the only true inheritor of the tradition of Hazlitt and Lamb — I found him hilarious, especially in his willingness to portray himself as disreputable or dimwitted (he was anything but) and to push the boundaries of convention, deflate pretension, and expose hypocrisy. And how could I, the author of a book called Against Joie de Vivre , not relate to the curmudgeonly, contrarian persona that Beerbohm often adopts? I’m a big fan, and my hope that he’ll be discovered by a wider audience led me to edit and write the introduction to The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm , published last year.
If you read just one: “Laughter”
Memorable lines: “A public crowd, because of a lack of broad impersonal humanity in me, rather insulates than absorbs me. Amidst the guffaws of a thousand strangers I become unnaturally grave. If these people were the entertainment, and I the audience, I should be sympathetic enough. But to be one of them is a position that drives me spiritually aloof.”
George Orwell
British, 1903–1950
Lopate’s take: Writing from the perspective of a decent everyman, Orwell tries, in all his autobiographical work, to position his own experience within the larger historical context. And, curiously, everyone finds his own Orwell; he’s a hero to the right and the left, and everyone likes to quote him for his own purposes. “Good prose is like a window pane,” he says in his essay “Why I Write,” and his own style is a model of clarity. Above all, Orwell is notable for his integrity, evident in his unwavering honesty about his own petty or ugly impulses (as in “Shooting an Elephant,” in which he admits to hating both the empire he serves as a police officer in Burma and the Burmese people, who make his life a living hell). With Orwell, the reader always feels that he’s leveling with us. He’s showing us how a decent, civilized person can have these appalling tendencies when faced with difficult options. Like all the best essayists, Orwell moves us toward complexity.
If you read just one: “Such, Such Were the Joys”
Memorable lines: “It is not easy for me to think of my schooldays without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling — a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories.”
James Baldwin
American, 1924–1987
Lopate’s take: In my view, the Harlem-raised Baldwin (who lived most of his adult life as an expatriate in Europe) is the most important American essayist of the postwar period. And perhaps nothing makes that case more eloquently than his masterwork, “Notes of a Native Son.” As with the best essays, what drives it is the writer’s need to figure out what he thinks. And “Notes” also showcases Baldwin’s trademark honesty and ability to turn himself into a character who comes alive on the page. In it, he braids together the Harlem riot of 1943, his father’s death, and his own young man’s confusions: Does he hate his father? Does he love his father? Is he becoming his father? He juggles all these different perspectives, moving between past and present and between individual psychology and the sociological. It’s a twenty-page essay with the density of a novella.
If you read just one: “Notes of a Native Son”
Memorable lines: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.”
Joan Didion
American, 1934–
Lopate’s take: Didion, a native Californian, came to essay writing through journalism, and her meticulous reporting skills shine through everything she writes. While many essayists flee from the topical, she is attracted to it, drawing fascinating connections among various cultural phenomena of the day, from rock songs to California weather to the Manson Family murders. Regardless of the topic, we want to know what Didion has to say about it; after being bombarded by what all the half-wits are saying, we need to see what a sophisticated eye like Didion’s sees. There’s something poignant in her cool, incisive prose style (Hemingway was a major influence), particularly in her presentation of self — generally as small (a kind of little girl in the corner), timid, inarticulate, and not especially likable. Like Baldwin, Didion demonstrates an invaluable skill of the personal essayist: the ability to make herself a compelling character.
If you read just one: “Goodbye to All That”
Memorable lines: “To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F. A. O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (‘Money,’ and ‘High Fashion,’ and ‘The Hucksters’), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.”
Vivian Gornick
American, 1935–
Lopate’s take: The Bronx-born Gornick, a stalwart of the feminist movement, is a quintessentially urban writer, drawing material for her personal essays almost entirely from the streets of New York City. She’s an American version of what the French call a flâneur , or, in her case, a flâneuse : someone who’s constantly on the street, walking around, observing, and having amusing encounters with strangers. Gornick casts herself as an “odd woman” (her latest book is titled The Odd Woman and the City ), who is lonely but stubborn and whose friends have become her surrogate family. She builds her essays out of the fragments she picks up as she wanders around the city. It’s territory she’s perfected and owns.
If you read just one: “On the Street: Nobody Watches, Everyone Performs”
Memorable lines: “They’re in the room with me now, these people I brushed against today. They’ve become company, great company. I’d rather be here with them tonight than with anyone else I know. They return the narrative impulse to me. Let me make sense of things. Remind me to tell the story I cannot make my life tell. I need them.”
Richard Rodriguez
American, 1944–
Lopate’s take: Raised by Mexican immigrant parents in Sacramento, California, Rodriguez ’85GS, ’91SOA documented his gradual separation from their world in his celebrated 1982 book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez . This acute assessment of what it means to become an American took an unpopular position, because the book basically says that you can’t go back to the old country; you can’t be a hyphenate in America. When you assimilate, you lose your roots. So the minute Rodriguez became a “scholarship boy,” there was a schism between him and his parents. Accustomed to going against the grain — he opposes affirmative action and bilingual education; he is a spiritual person whose peers are secular; he claims membership in an institution (the Catholic Church) that officially condemns his homosexuality — Rodriguez is comfortable with paradox. And that results in a bemused, disenchanted point of view that I find witty, wise, and very reassuring.
If you read just one: “Late Victorians”
Memorable lines: “At the high school where César taught, teachers and parents had organized a campaign to keep kids from driving themselves to the junior prom, in an attempt to forestall liquor and death. Such a scheme momentarily reawakened César’s Latin skepticism. Didn’t the Americans know? (His tone exaggerated incredulity.) Teenagers will crash into lampposts on their way home from proms, and there is nothing to be done about it. You cannot forbid tragedy.”
More From Arts & Humanities
6 Major Artworks You Might Not Know Were Created by Columbians
From sculptures to subway art, these permanent installations in the New York City metro area were conceived by alumni and faculty
A Pride Month Watch List
Twelve notable films centered on LGBTQ+ characters, all made by or starring Columbians
Vampire Weekend Still Haunts Columbia
Only God Was Above Us reveals that the band continues to be inspired by New York City and by nostalgia for its members’ college days
Stay Connected.
Sign up for our newsletter.
General Data Protection Regulation
Columbia University Privacy Notice
- Language, Linguistics & Writing
- Linguistics
Sorry, there was a problem.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
- To view this video download Flash Player
Follow the author
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Paperback – 15 January 1997
Save extra with 2 offers.
- Free Delivery
7 days Replacement
- Amazon Delivered
- Pay on Delivery
- Secure transaction
| Replacement Reason | Replacement Period | Replacement Policy |
|---|---|---|
| Physical Damage, Defective, Wrong and Missing Item | 7 days from delivery | Replacement |
Replacement Instructions
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length 832 pages
- Language English
- Publisher Anchor
- Publication date 15 January 1997
- Dimensions 15.34 x 4.14 x 23.27 cm
- ISBN-10 038542339X
- ISBN-13 978-0385423397
- Lexile measure 1180L
- See all details
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Product description
From the publisher.
"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., product details.
- Publisher : Anchor (15 January 1997)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 832 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038542339X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385423397
- Item Weight : 1 kg 70 g
- Dimensions : 15.34 x 4.14 x 23.27 cm
- Country of Origin : USA
- #615 in Linguistics (Books)
- #1,040 in Essays (Books)
- #1,999 in Anthologies (Books)
About the author
Phillip lopate.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 74%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 13%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 8%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 74% 13% 8% 0% 5% 5%
- Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews
Top reviews from India
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..
Top reviews from other countries
- Press Releases
- Amazon Science
- Sell on Amazon
- Sell under Amazon Accelerator
- Protect and Build Your Brand
- Amazon Global Selling
- Supply to Amazon
- Become an Affiliate
- Fulfilment by Amazon
- Advertise Your Products
- Amazon Pay on Merchants
- Your Account
- Returns Centre
- Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
- 100% Purchase Protection
- Amazon App Download
- Conditions of Use & Sale
- Privacy Notice
- Interest-Based Ads
The Art of the Personal Essay
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1994
Plot Summary
Continue your reading experience
Subscribe to access our Study Guide library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on 8,000+ literary works ranging from novels to nonfiction to poetry
- Sign in / Join
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
Results from Google Books
Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
| (9) (9) | (Editor) (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor) — , (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor), (Contributor) | Reviews | Popularity | Average rating | Mentions | |
| (4.08) | ||||||
| … ( ) | ||||||
| Recently added by | , , , , , , , , |
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
No current Talk conversations about this book.
» Add other authors
| Author name | Role | Type of author | Work? | Status |
| Editor | primary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed | |
| Contributor | secondary author | all editions | confirmed |
Is an abridged version of
Has as a student's study guide, notable lists.
| to edit Common Knowledge data. For more help see the . | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Canonical title | References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English (1)
No library descriptions found.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
IMAGES
COMMENTS
By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays ...
By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays ...
The Art of the Personal Essay Hardcover - January 1, 1994. by Phillip Lopate (Author) 4.5 319 ratings. See all formats and editions. For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its ...
By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays ...
Finished reading "Art of the Personal Essay" complied by Phillip Lopate for school and I enjoyed learning about the development of the personal essay from Ancient Rome to present day. While at times, the language can get tough and the metaphors a bit cmplicated to understand, any true bibliophile and writer should pick up this book at least once.
The 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." ...
Philip Lopate is the author of Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, The Rug Merchant, Being with Children, and Confessions of Summer.A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, his works have appeared in Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize annuals, and many other publications.He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is Adams Professor of English at ...
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 ...
By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays ...
Lopate is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the Library of America's Writing New York, as well as the series editor of The Art of the Essay. His film criticism appears regularly in The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Phillip Lopate's The Glorious American Essay was published by Pantheon Books ...
The Art of the personal essay : an anthology from the classical era to the present. Publication date 1995 Topics Essays, Essays -- Translations into English ... Lopate, Phillip, 1943-; Teachers & Writers Collaborative Boxid IA1765022 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set ...
Lopate finds ample support for his description of the personal essayist's "idler" persona in the many essays included in this anthology simply on the subject of walking. Compare the content and tone of these essays by Steele, Hazlitt, Stevenson, Beerbohm, Woolf, and Thoreau. 15.
Summary. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present is an extensive collection of essays compiled by Phillip Lopate, an English professor at Hofstra ...
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.
"The Art of the Personal Essay" by Philip Lopate is a literary exploration that unveils the intricacies of a captivating and deeply personal genre. In this c...
Phillip Lopate Celebrates the Personal Essay. (and recommends six great essayists he really thinks you should read) O ne day in the 1980s, the writer Phillip Lopate '64CC stood before the bookcase of a vacation home he had rented for the summer, looking for something to read. His eyes fell on a volume by William Hazlitt, and though Lopate ...
By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays ...
In his nonfiction book The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (1994), American literary critic Phillip Lopate explores the history of personal essay-writing, from the first century C.E. up to the modern era in America. Lopate finds these essays to be a crucial component to understanding the lifestyles and social mores of people throughout history.
by Phillip Lopate (Editor) "For more than four hundred years the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its.
While it may be argued that the essays themselves reveal the most about the history and form of this genre, Phillip Lopate's introduction is a wonderful (and quite amusing) way to get to know the personal essay. The following are excerpts from that introduction: This book attempts to put forward and interpret a tradition: the personal essay.
Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best ...
Panikkar's sound is creamy and elegant. As Gandhi in Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," the smoothness of his voice made for meditative serenity. But as Alexei in Prokofiev's "The Gambler ...
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present The Art of the Pe [Phillip Lopate] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present The Art of the Pe
Phillip Lopate is a convivial movie date, and his film essays have the poetry―and punch―of legendary sports reporters. For him, though, cinephilia is less a sport than a faith. Lopate's My Affair with Art House Cinema spans the last quarter-century of work by the likes of Chantal Akerman and Ingmar Bergman to Francois Truffaut and Frederick ...