The American Essay in the American Century (review)

The American essay is rich in apologists, champions, and missionaries who seek to secure its place as a literary genre in which some of the country’s most vivid ideas and exciting aesthetic experiments have been tested, and I would have to count myself among them. For at least the past 20 years, interest in American essays has slowly increased, with scholar-practitioners and literary theorists providing varied approaches to reading, teaching, and writing essays. Strangely, for a genre that so often has been dismissed for being tied to its moment and context of composition, there have been few full-length studies of the genre’s history in America in the twentieth century. In fact, until this year, if you were seeking a robust overview, I would have recommended beginning your search as I did in 1998 with the 11-part entry in The Encyclopedia of the Essay on the American essay, coauthored by Ned Stuckey-French. Now, readers have an even better starting point.

Ned Stuckey-French’s remarkable book The American Essay in the American Century chronicles the fall and rise of the genre from 1820, with the success of Washington Irving’s essay collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., to 1944, when E. B. White’s second edition of One Man’s Meat was temporarily banned from the reading materials sent to overseas soldiers, on the grounds that its liberalism would sway military personnel to elect Franklin D. Roosevelt to a fourth term. Stuckey-French recreates this unfamiliar story through exacting, extensive, and much needed new historical research and analysis.

Were this all he accomplished, it would have been a satisfying complement to well-known single-author studies, such as Robert Root’s acclaimed E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist, and important recent work that focuses on specific subgenres of the American essay, such as Brian Norman’s The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. In fact, The American Essay in the American Century traces at least two other histories. One locates key moments between 1880 and 1944 when Americans in the middle class most actively sought personal essays in popular magazines. By the 1920s, this readerly demand for accessible, witty writing created a climate in which Harold Ross was able to quickly establish the New Yorker. The other history tells a revealing story about how E. B. White—the beloved, familiar, and persistently misread American writer—claimed for himself and for the personal essay an ethical purpose and political power during and after his tenure at the New Yorker. The American Essay in the American Century dramatizes both how much we can learn about American culture and thought by reading essays with knowledge of their original context, and how much historical recovery there is left to do for students of the form.

Stuckey-French does a tremendous amount and variety of intellectual work in the volume’s nine sections, which comprise six full-length chapters, an introduction, epilogue, and a succinct but illuminating preface. Many readers of Fourth Genre know Ned Stuckey-French as the editor of its book review section, as well as a personal essayist, labor organizer, scholar, and teacher. He constructs The American Essay in the American Century to draw on insights he has gleaned in each of these roles, and more often melds them. He reminds us by virtuosic example that essays and historical accounts both depend on distilling others’ stories and finding a central image, moment, or scene to enact or embody the essayist’s idea, rather than simply to exemplify it.

The introduction, titled “Defending the Essay,” argues in fresh terms for why the genre is a worthy object of study, despite (or perhaps because of) White’s and others’ concerns about its “second-class citizenship.” Stuckey-French also provides a robust theoretical framework for his approach to the book. One of his many goals is to foreground the sites—physical and literary—where Americans...