Essays of Futures Past

Although essays on the death of the essay abounded in the early twentieth century, Ned Stuckey-French demonstrates in The American Essay in the American Century that what was dying was "a particular kind of essay and the America of which it had been a part." One thread of his book recounts the transition from the fireside musings and ambling meditations of essayists in the "Genteel Tradition" through the jaunty, vigorous, and largely urban reflections of popular newspaper "colyumnists" and magazine essayists to the emergence of E. B. White as "arguably the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century." Stuckey-French argues that White's 1940s columns for Harper's, subsequently collected in One Man's Meat, "signaled a breakthrough for the American personal essay." White's essays combined the "warmth, self-deprecation, and irony" of his writing for The New Yorker with "more serious" thinking "possessed of a greater sense of citizenship." Reviewing that book, Irving Edman declared, "Mr. White is our finest essayist, perhaps our only one."

Tracing the arc of the American essay from Washington Irving to E. B. White, Stuckey-French provides a thorough and enlightening overview of largely forgotten figures: Genteel essayists Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fanny Fern, Donald Grant Mitchell (who wrote as "Ik Marvel"), and George William Curtis; influential colyumnists Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.), and Heywood Broun. These writers are relevant in their own right and significant as White's precursors: when he began writing from his saltwater farm in Maine, he was well aware of Ik Marvel's farm book Wet Days at Edgewood (1865) and the equally bucolic Adventures in Contentment by "David Grayson" (another pseudonymous essayist), and he gave due homage to Morley and Adams, who had published his poetry in their columns, and especially Marquis, whom he expressly imitated in some very powerful political essays. Stuckey-French's perceptive and wide-ranging review of the American essay's evolution encourages tracking down and perusing a number of these writers.

The second thread of the book, masterfully interwoven with the essay's history, traces the transformation in American culture in the same period. "The American Century," according to Stuckey-French, "encompassed roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four of the twentieth," a sixty-year span in which American culture changed radically. The decline of the agricultural economy and rural life style, the rise of the middle class, the faster pace of urban life, "evolving text technologies"—all these created a different audience for the essay and required a different kind of essayist. Stuckey-French is astute in his assessment of this transformation and its influence on the essay, as well as of the essay's contribution to the transformation.

By chronicling the parallel shifts in American society and intellectual thought and in the American essay over six decades, Stuckey-French suggests ways that social, political, and commercial shifts impact the literature created in a culture. He offers a corrective to the narrower perspectives of ideology and class that arise, often unacknowledged, in literary criticism. In the case of the essay, a continuous debate about the death of the essay tended to be energized by the aesthetic or sociological politics of the critics taking sides. Cultural conservatives defined the essay largely in terms of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stereotypes, continuing a kind of critical life support to a form of the essay practiced by earlier masters, most notably Charles Lamb. Cultural progressives argued for either a more journalistic emphasis on reportage and research or for a more polemical emphasis on opinion and advocacy, preferring articles and editorials over essays. The rise of the middle class altered perspectives. Where the division between an elite culture of the educated and wealthy and the "folk" culture of the working class had once been more pronounced, the advent of radio, film, and popular newspapers and magazines generated a demand for commercially viable literature and the creation of what has...