Democracy's Essay

In "Confessions of an Anthologist," his "Foreword" to the 26th annual edition of the highly acclaimed Best American Essays, Robert Atwan, the series editor, recounts how his " hardly conventional career path" led him to be characterized as "a noted anthologist." Growing up in an urban working-class family where the principal texts for reading were "New York tabloids and daily racing sheets," Atwan describes himself as more than "a voracious and indiscriminating reader, I was an obsessive one." To allay his father's anxieties that he had "his nose in a book" too often, Bob Atwan played baseball, although, as he notes, "there were many times while standing alone out in center field inning after inning waiting for a fly ball I wished I had hidden a Zane Grey paperback inside my perfectly oiled Rawlings."

Atwan recalls his first visit to the Paterson Free Public Library and being "awed by the gleaming mahogany card catalogues," an evocative moment reminiscent of Richard Wright's first library visit. Atwan's reading concentrates not on "those rare moments of startling insight or realization" but on "those sudden flashes of anxious confusion and bewilderment." He concludes with the powerful understanding that by "reading anything and everything" he "would never be bored in [his] entire life," and with the concurrent "dizzying sense of unease" at reading's "terrifying rush of unknown possibilities."

The modest circumstances of Atwan's early life, coupled with his own admirable thinking and writing about the essay in each "Foreword" in the Best American Essays series, re-inscribe the fundamental importance of reading and writing literature as deeply democratic activities.

On balance, it is not surprising that Robert Atwan, despite numerous other literary and scholarly publications, might be best known for his stewardship of the essay. Through his deft and unobtrusive editorship of the Best American Essays series, Atwan has done more than anyone else over the past several decades to rekindle interest in the essay as a literary genre among the general reading public as well as academics.

Of all of the literary genres, the essay has remained, throughout its distinguished history, and especially in this country, the most egalitarian form of literature: in its subject matter, structure, voice, and readership. The essay's accessibility—for writers and readers—exemplifies the art of democracy.

That accessibility remains both its most distinctive and problematic feature. The essay is one of the most readily intelligible and attainable forms of self-articulation and individual power in contemporary writing. So, too, virtually anyone can write an essay marked by recognizable literary merit. This may well be one reason the essay as a literary genre been marginalized for so long in literary "canons" and in the academy, which privileges the exceptional and the seemingly unattainable.

In "The Modern Essay," Virginia Woolf offers an incisive assessment of the state of the essay as a literary genre at the turn of the twentieth century as well as a prescient forecast of its near demise in the decades that followed. Woolf points to the emergence of expository writing—in the ascendancy of the magazine article in an era fixated on systematic measurement and generalization—as the source of the "common greyness [that] silvers everything." With the widespread application of Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management far beyond corporate enterprise, reading habits shifted from pleasure to information. The "gentle reader," long assumed as the primary audience for such established periodicals as Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Century, was soon lost amidst the crowd's pressing need for new information about the world and seeking advice about how to manage and succeed in it. More and more magazines surfaced to address the increased demand for timely and specialized information from impatient audiences as well as to capitalize on the pervasive fascination with consumption. Popular magazines quickly evolved into the informational counterpart of the retail department store.

Many readers lacked the time and the curiosity to ponder a writer's deliberately paced insights on seemingly mundane aspects...