This chapter explores the post–World War II period in the United States, charting the postwar feminist essay in three directions: first, as a site of consciousness-raising during feminism’s second wave; second, as a space for feminist critiques of feminisms during the so-called third wave; and third, in its contemporary iteration in a revived consciousness-raising context: the #MeToo essay. The chapter draws together formally and contextually diverse texts into a longer conversation about how the essay can be read as a politicized and politicizing literary form. These texts include nonfiction subgenres often thought to be subordinate to the essay: an article, a collectively authored set of papers, a prose poem, a memoir, and a victim impact statement. The chapter argues that what makes these texts “feminist” and “essays” – despite significant formal differences – is their shared engagement with critical, documentary, and experiential literary modes and their stakes in connecting the individual to politically invested collectives, past and future. These five essays explicitly address gender and contingent forces of oppression that both bond and trouble emancipatory collectives.

This chapter begins with the origins of "social justice," a term that emerged among Jesuits in the 1840s and ’50s and then infused the Catholic workers’ movements and social teaching of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American essayists and activists have used the essay to persuade readers of the productive overlap of two utopian systems: Christianity and (democratic) socialism. This chapter explores five thinkers – Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Cornel West – who have been particularly prolific essayists, writing fluently and frequently about social justice in the earliest sense of the word. By recalling the earliest context of the term social justice, this chapter adds another dimension to contemporary debates on everything from Black struggle to economic inequality, from climate justice to equitable representation at all levels of government. The essay form allowed the writers studied in this chapter to articulate in a variety of styles, from the lyrical to the vociferous, the pedagogical to the morally urgent, the need for a compassionate understanding of human wretchedness in an industrialized world bent on breaking the worker.

This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

The overlap of poetry and essay in modern and contemporary American writing is the focus of this chapter. Covering the literary manifesto, essays on poetry, and the rise of the modern poet-critic, the chapter explores examples of formal and procedural essaying in postmodern and contemporary poetry. These include construction and deconstruction of a speaker-subject, theoretical experimentation, translation, documentary, and social critique. The chapter reflects on the position of the subjective "I" in the essay, lyric and experimental poetry, and hybrids of these and dwells in its conclusion on the problems of form and process in the lyric essay or essayistic poem.

This chapter offers the account of an underexplored subgenre of Indigenous writing, namely, the Native American essay. Historically, these essays bore witness to individual and collective loss and injustice and told the history of murder, dispossession, forced reeducation, exploitation, and mistreatment that characterizes the encounter with European colonizers. In their essays, Indigenous people have proclaimed their existence and continuance and argued for sovereignty. Many of these essays appear embedded in the forms of stories, sermons, appeals, ethnographies, autobiographies, journals, and periodicals, as well as in scholarship. Their style and subject matter are wide ranging, with reflections on the natural world, identity, tradition, self-governance, and spirituality. The contributions of important Indigenous essayists like Samson Occom, E. Pauline Johnson, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Eastman, Winona LaDuke, and Leslie Marmon Silko show the breadth, depth, and beauty of Indigenous writing from the eighteenth century to today.

In a photo essay called America and the Americans (1966), which pairs John Steinbeck’s writing with striking images taken by forty American photographers, the reader encounters this description of the country’s gestation.

The relationship between the law and the essay, this chapter shows, is visible in the etymology of the latter. Derived from assayer, to try, and essai, or trial, the etymology connotes action, endeavor, and experiment aimed at proof leading to judgment. However, the essay as literary genre is often marked not by the finality of judgment but by levity, incompletion, indigestion, distraction, and exploratory attempts. The apparently antithetical senses of the essay – as comedic and judicial, frivolous and veridical, theatrical and juristic, popular and esoteric – are key to understanding its later development and certain specifically distinctive features of the “American” genre of legal exploratory discourse. This chapter shows the influence of pragmatism and egalitarian realism on American legal writing, offers examples of the legal polemics that unfolded in the pages of important American law journals, and argues that the importance of the essay form is to clear a space, to act out in ideas what practice has not yet tested, and so to become the theater that stages in advance the future of law.

This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter surveys the rise of New Criticism in American letters during the interwar years through the 1950s. It pays attention to the influence of two overlapping associations: the Fugitive Poets and the Nashville Agrarians. The Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt English professors and Nashville notables, had formed in the years leading up to World War I to discuss current trends in literature and philosophy. The Agrarians, southern commentators trained in a variety of disciplines, collaborated on a symposium in the 1930s that decried the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism and promoted values that purportedly undergirded an agrarian economy. Together the two groups came to shape the tenets of New Criticism. New Critics mourned the turn away from formalist principles that had established the criteria by which one should evaluate literature. Agrarians bemoaned the demise of a set of values that ostensibly emerged from a labor system that championed family farming, property ownership, and small government. Both New Critics and Agrarians, then, engaged in reclamation projects as they sought to salvage what they believed to be all that was good and beautiful in the world.

This chapter chronologically follows the development of the American science essay from the eighteenth century, through the foundation of government, corporate, and university research institutes, and ending with contemporary criticism of research practices. Throughout history, science essayists have brought knowledge of new discoveries to the general public by writing in accessible, unexpected, and lyrical prose. They fill a gap between the specialist’s research and the public’s hunger for science news. Beyond communicating research to a mass audience, the science essay offers a space for moral reflection and debate about the implications of scientific knowledge and technological advancements. Science essayists share the common goal of situating research within both a personal perspective and a broad worldview. The science essay acknowledges humanity’s place within nature, embracing scientific insight while questioning the instrumentalism from which it springs.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

With a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter recounts the history of American nature writing in its many iterations. Like the essay in general, nature writing is a hybrid form. It is omnivorous, incorporating elements of travel writing, natural philosophy, ethnography, diarism, and epistolary writing. Nature writing of the period in question is filled with technical information on plants and animals, agricultural practices, and methods for hunting or navigating, but it also abounds with metaphysical speculations, theological pronouncements, elaborate landscape descriptions, and dramatic accounts of practices like hiking, camping, fishing, and farming. Authors of many of the most well-known essays had professional ties to disciplines like geology, botany, and forestry. Featured essayists in this chapter include St. John de Crèvecoeur, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon, among others.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

Focusing on the work of Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Cora Diamond, this chapter shows how twentieth-century academic philosophy in the United States can be characterized in part by an ongoing interest in and exploration of the essay as a philosophical form. In a pluralist spirit, these explorations approach the essay form as a place to rethink and remodel what philosophical argumentation might look like. Related to this work of reimagining, such writing addresses the proximity of philosophy to literature in two senses. First, it is attentive to the potentially literary, written character of philosophy. Second, it is characterized by an interest in taking up works of literature philosophically, as a continuation of philosophical analysis and as a means of immanent criticism precipitating questions about philosophical analysis itself. That the essay became a salient form for these philosophers reflects their methodological radicalism. Each asks questions about philosophy as a kind of writing, and, as Rorty noted, writing tends to come to the foreground in periods of disciplinary crisis or radicalism, when the implicit “stage-setting” of a discipline comes under question.

This chapter considers the Federalist Papers, an essay collection by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay under the pseudonym Publius and advocating for the ratification of the US Constitution starting in 1787. Beginning with reflections on the origins of the word essay and its many meanings, particular attention is given to one of these: the essay as an attempt to do something, either as an action or through writing. A central question guided the ratification debate: Could there be an essay – a concerted effort – striving toward just representation? In the passionate debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a secondary, hidden debate was simmering: In what kind of prose should arguments be articulated? Was the essay, with its notoriously loose style and method, up to the task? In its ability to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in the same textual space, was it ideal for puzzling out the nation’s future? Or was it too distracted, a form of bad thought scribbled in haste, unsuited for such a momentous task? This chapter shows the correlative features of striving toward a political ideal and the striving involved in essayistic writing.