The Oxford Book of Essays

by John Gross

Overview

The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch—though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument.

All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond.

This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199556557
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2008
Series:	Oxford Books of Prose & Verse
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	704
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

John Gross was a major editor and critic who worked for the TLS, the New York Times, and the Sunday Telegraph during his illustrious career.

Table of Contents

Includes essays by: Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, Goldsmith, Lamb, Hazlitt, Benjamin Franklin, Carlyle, Newman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Thoreau, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain, W. H. Hudson, William James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Conrad, Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, G. K. Chesterton, Lytton Strachey, Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, J. B. S. Haldane, Aldous Huxley, James Thurber, Edmund Wilson, V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Lionel Trilling, Jan Morris, Richard Cobb, John Updike, Joan Didion, Clive James.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a collection that succeeds in demonstrating the marvelous variety of the genre."—The Christian Science Monitor

"A distinguished miscellany."—The Chicago Tribune

"Most of the essays are very good indeed....A seductive anthology."—The Economist

From the Publisher