American Essay in the American Century

“A splendidly researched and admirably written study of a largely unknown segment of American literary history. Stuckey-French makes a compelling case for the ways the evolution of the personal essay both shaped America’s middle class and was in turn shaped by it.”—Robert Atwan, series editor of The Best American Essays

“Eloquently written and perfectly argued, The American Essay in the American Century provides, through careful analysis and through example, a cogent reminder about the value and the pleasure of nonfiction prose. Always insightfully attuned to the cultural politics negotiated by the American essayist as he or she constructs ideal readers and idealizes the authorial position from which to address them, Ned Stuckey-French deftly examines the history of the essay in American culture. This is a smart, artful discussion of an important American art form.”—Alan Nadel, author of Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age and, most recently, Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity