THE WRITTEN WORD
Essays & Longform Journalism
11 books
Eleven books in the tradition of the long-form non-fiction essay — the form that takes a subject seriously enough to give it the time and space it needs, that trusts the reader to follow a complicated argument through to its end, and that produces work that is simultaneously reporting, criticism, and literature. The list covers American and British essayists, political journalism, cultural criticism, and the specific achievement of writers who use nonfiction as a form of art rather than a vehicle for information delivery. The essay tradition is one of the most undervalued in English literature; these eleven books make the case for it more effectively than any argument about the form's importance could.
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WAR
Sebastian Junger
Although the war in Afghanistan has been going on for more than a decade, soldiers and cultural pundits alike have often noted how completely removed the vast majority of the American public is from that reality. Journalist Sebastian Junger closes that gap a little by transporting us to a hooch in the Korengal Valley where he spent five months living, sleeping, and coming under fire with the US 2nd Battalion. Junger offers a vivid, page-turning portrait of what it’s like to be in combat, the powerful bond between men who experience it together, the nature of the love and courage born from battle, and why despite its danger and hardships, men are drawn to it again and again. The book is a must-read, however, not simply because of its penetrating observations on war, but for its insight into the very nature of manhood and honor –- stripped to its most basic core.
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Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace
Wallace applies his full intellectual machinery to subjects that don't expect it — the ethics of boiling lobsters alive at the Maine Lobster Festival, the talk radio industry as a political phenomenon, the pornography industry's annual convention in Las Vegas, John McCain's 2000 primary campaign — and the results are the best American literary essays of the decade. Around 343 pages. The lobster essay is famous; the piece on talk radio and the McCain essay are better, and the 100-page essay on usage and language that closes the collection is the most entertaining piece of prescriptive grammar ever written. String Theory, his tennis writing, appears on the Tennis list. This collection covers the rest of the territory. The reader who thinks Wallace is too difficult will find these essays more accessible than the novels and considerably funnier.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
Didion spent the late 1960s watching California come apart — the Haight-Ashbury at the peak of the Summer of Love, the specific unreality of the Los Angeles entertainment industry, the center of American culture failing to hold — and wrote about it with a coldness that made the essays feel like dispatches from a war zone rather than cultural criticism. The title essay on Haight-Ashbury is the best piece of American journalism of the 1960s and the most accurate account of what the counterculture actually looked like from inside rather than from the mythology that replaced it. Around 238 pages. The AoM reader who assumes Didion is a women's list writer will find she is a diagnostician of American self-delusion who happens to be a woman, which is a different thing entirely.
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Arguably
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens published this final collection in 2011, the year he died of esophageal cancer, and it is the fullest demonstration of what he could do: essays on Proust, on Orwell, on the Parthenon marbles, on Islamism, on Trotsky, on the alleged benefits of waterboarding (he tried it), and on a dozen other subjects, all written in prose that is precise, combative, and structurally immaculate. Around 750 pages and the most demanding book on this list — Hitchens assumes the reader has read widely and argues accordingly. Note the political perspective throughout: Hitchens was a former Trotskyist who became a supporter of the Iraq War, and the essays argue positions across the spectrum with equal force. The reader who disagrees with him on every political point will still finish the book having been shown what serious argumentative prose looks like.
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Essays
George Orwell
Orwell wrote the most important political prose of the twentieth century in these essays — Politics and the English Language, which remains the best account of how dishonest language corrupts honest thought; Shooting an Elephant, about the specific psychology of colonial authority; Why I Write, about the four motives that produce serious prose. He wrote them between 1931 and 1950, while also writing Animal Farm and 1984, while also fighting in Spain, while also dying of tuberculosis. Around 1,400 pages in the full Penguin collection — the reader who wants a shorter entry point goes to the selected Penguin Essays of George Orwell at around 640 pages. The canonical entry on this list: the origin point of the British political essay tradition that Hitchens inherited and the standard against which all subsequent political prose is measured.
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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Hunter S. Thompson
Thompson covered the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone as it happened — filing dispatches from the press bus, the campaign hotels, and the convention floor with the specific combination of chemical impairment and political fury that produced the most honest account of how American presidential campaigns actually work. McGovern loses to Nixon in a landslide; Thompson documents every step of the machinery that produced the result, including the press corps that covered it. Around 506 pages and the political journalism entry on this list. Note the political perspective: Thompson hated Nixon with a specificity that occasionally distorts the reporting and never affects the accuracy of the structural observations. The reader who wants Thompson at his most purely entertaining goes to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; this is Thompson at his most useful.
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The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
Wolfe covered the Mercury astronauts in 1979 and invented a way of writing nonfiction that hadn't existed before: the interior monologue of a man strapping himself into a rocket, the specific sociology of test pilot culture, the unspoken code of masculine competence that the astronauts called the right stuff and never defined directly because defining it would have violated it. Around 436 pages and the anchor entry on this list — the book that established what New Journalism could do when a writer with a novelist's toolkit was turned loose on a true story. The reader who finishes this and wants more Wolfe goes to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby for the early magazine work. The reader who wants the same approach applied to war goes to Michael Herr's Dispatches on the Cold War list.
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The Essays of Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne invented the essay as a form in the 1570s — a French nobleman who retired to a tower, painted a question on the ceiling that read WHAT DO I KNOW?, and spent twenty years writing about cannibals, experience, friendship, idleness, cruelty, and the specific problem of how to live, producing in the process the most direct and honest prose in the European literary tradition before the twentieth century. The Penguin Selected Essays edited by M.A. Screech runs around 400 pages and is the right entry point. The origin point entry on this list: every essay writer since 1580 has been working in Montaigne's form whether they acknowledged it or not. The reader who expects Renaissance philosophy to be difficult will be surprised — Montaigne writes as if he is talking directly to whoever is reading, which is exactly what he intended.
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Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris
Sedaris spent his twenties in New York failing to become an artist, moved to France in his forties and failed to become French, and wrote about both experiences with a self-deprecation so precise it reads as a form of autobiography. The humor entry on this list and the funniest book on it: the essays on his father's jazz obsession, his French language classes, his siblings, and his own consistent inability to be competent at anything he attempted are as well-constructed as anything in American comic writing. Around 272 pages. The AoM reader who approaches this skeptically because he has seen Sedaris on NPR will find the written work considerably darker and more structurally rigorous than the public radio persona suggests. The piece about his sister the taxidermist alone justifies the purchase.
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Fame and Obscurity
Gay Talese
Talese spent his career at Esquire doing something nobody else did as well: spending months with a single subject — Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, a New York Times pressman, a bridge builder — until the accumulated detail produced a portrait that the subject could not have given in an interview and would probably have preferred not to exist. This collection covers the best of that work. The profile of Sinatra — written without a single interview because Sinatra refused to participate — is the most celebrated magazine piece in American journalism and demonstrates the method at its peak. Around 368 pages and the craft entry on this list: the reader who wants to understand how serious longform journalism is constructed comes here. Cross-seeds with the Craft, Skill & Mastery list.
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Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Baldwin wrote these essays between 1948 and 1955 — on Harlem, on his father's death, on the specific experience of being Black in America and in Europe, on the machinery of American racial self-deception — and published them in 1955 at 175 pages. The title essay, which interweaves his father's funeral with the Harlem riots of 1943, is the finest personal essay in American literature. Around 175 pages and the short entry on this list. The AoM reader who approaches Baldwin as a political writer will find he is primarily a literary writer whose subject happens to be the most important unresolved question in American history, which makes the politics more not less powerful. Cross-seeds with the American History list. The reader who wants more Baldwin goes directly to The Fire Next Time, the essential companion.