The Making of the American Essay: Exploring the Contours and Possibilities of Nonfiction Writing

That leads to an enormous scope, including in form. The texts in this volume range from under ten to over thirty pages. Some are deliberately lineated, while others stretch out as dense, unbroken paragraphs across multiple pages. They vary in tone and subject from whimsy to trauma, meditation to suicide. These selections are so varied in terms of form, style, voice, and structure that it can be difficult to trace the ligatures between each essay.

For two decades, essayist John D'Agata has been exploring the contours of the essay through a series of innovative, informative, and expansive anthologies that have become foundational texts in the study of the genre. The breakthrough first volume, The Next American Essay, highlighted major work from 1974 to 2003, while the second, The Lost Origins of the Essay, showcased the essay's ancient and international forebears. Now, with The Making of the American Essay, D'Agata concludes his monumental tour of this inexhaustible form, with selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet's secular prayers to Washington Irving's satires, Emily Dickinson's love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith's catalogues, Gertrude Stein's portraits to James Baldwin's and Norman Mailer's meditations on boxing. Across the anthologies, D'Agata's introductions to each selection-intimate and brilliantly provocative throughout-serve as an extended treatise, collectively forming the backbone of the trilogy. He uncovers new stories in the American essay's past, and shows us that some of the most fiercely daring writers in the American literary canon have turned to the essay in order to produce our culture's most exhilarating art. The Making of the American Essay offers the essay at its most varied, unique, and imaginative best, proving that the impulse to make essays in America is as old and as original as the nation itself.

the making of the american essay

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This marks the 12th year that nonfiction graduate students served as judges for the newly renamed Krause Essay Prize, a national award presented to an essayist who pushes the boundaries of the genre through experimentation, exploration, and discovery. Thought to be the only national literary honor selected by students, the prize is accompanied by a $10,000 award for the first time this year thanks to a new partnership between the UI Nonfiction Writing Program and the Kyle J. and Sharon Krause Family Foundation.

This year's Krause Essay Prize recipient is Shawn Wen, a San Francisco-based multimedia artist and the author of A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause (Sarabande Books, 2017), a book-length essay on the life of French mime Marcel Marceau. Wen, whom students selected from a pool of 14 nominees, accepted her award at a ceremony in September in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber.

Wen says she's been "over the moon" since learning she was selected as this year's Krause Essay Prize winner. A producer for Youth Radio in Oakland, California, Wen says discovering essay writing "was very much like falling in love" and has long admired the UI's approach to the genre. "When I started writing essays, I felt like all these dusty windows in my brain were opened, letting in light and fresh air," she says. "It's incredibly meaningful to me that my writing has been recognized by this program and its students."

The support from the Krause family has not only allowed the program to award a cash prize for the first time, but also to invite winners to campus to present their essays and spend time with students and faculty. When Wen visited in late September, she taught a series of master classes for nonfiction students. D'Agata says that the foundation's support further legitimizes the idea of a student-driven award and its importance to the literary world.

The UI Nonfiction Writing Program has awarded a national essay-writing prize annually since 2007. With support from the Kyle J. and Sharon Krause Family Foundation, the award was renamed the Krause Essay Prize this year. For more on the prize, visit krauseessayprize.org.

I want to stake out a different position in this debate. Contrary to the nativists, the increasing and resilient diversity-the polyethnism-of the United States is a current and future fact. Multiple subnational and cross-national group loyalties can be neither wished away nor erased. Yet the idea of the nation-of the American nation-is worth defending against multicultural and cosmopolitan attack. A progressive American nationalism must be forward-looking, welcoming an America becoming rather than bemoaning an America lost. It is not enough to say, as some liberal assimilationists propose, that we should seek unity in commitment to a set of timeless civic values, including the value of diversity. America is an open-ended proposition. We cannot simply expect newcomers to assimilate to our culture, but must accept that they will change it. This view translates into policy recommendations-I will call them "ground rules"-intended to foster a nation comfortable with cultural diversity and culturally diverse groups loyal to the nation. Immigration policies ought to be forthrightly based on national interests-but once admitted, immigrants must be accepted as full participants in the making of America.

What James found troubling, others found bracing. In widely read essays and books, Horace Kallen suggested a model of "cultural pluralism" to replace the idea of the melting pot. Writing in the Nation in 1915, Kallen challenged both the fact and wisdom of the assimilation of immigrants to Anglo-Saxon America. He argued that the very process of Americanization produced "dissimilation" by bringing to light "permanent group distinctions." What was needed was not unison-everyone "singing the old Anglo-Saxon theme 'America'"-but rather harmony, in which the older theme might well be dominant but nonetheless "one among many." Such themes, according to Kallen, were "ancestrally determined." In his famous phrase, we can change our politics, philosophies, and spouses, but we "cannot change [our] grandfathers." Thus, the task before America was to provide "conditions under which each may attain the perfection that is proper to its kind."

Intellectual and essayist Randolph Bourne took a third position. Although a scion of New England WASPdom, he had none of James's sense of dispossession. Like Kallen, he was enthralled by the possibilities presented by the immigration of new groups to America. But in his remarkable essay "Trans-national America," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916, Bourne depicted an understanding of American nationality more fluid and open than Kallen's. American culture and traditions had always been supplied by immigrants. "The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant" whose "predominance in America [is] little more than a predominance of priority." New groups that sustain and expand their cultures here add something distinct to America: "The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native 'Americanism' around them."

Salins thus repeats the old error of seeing America as fixed and placing the needed adjustment exclusively on the immigrant's side. A more accurate understanding pictures America as a contract under constant renegotiation. Bourne suggested as much: "America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it."

At a time when people are debating the nature and origins of globalisation, and the making and meaning of modern American society, we need a careful and more sophisticated understanding of this crucial chapter in history. Similarly, thinking of Indians as pawns in a fixed game overlooks how many of them harnessed colonial forces to their own agendas, for greater or lesser periods of time. Many Native peoples carved out lives for themselves amid the destructiveness and degradation of Euro-American rule.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of many Asian American art associations and societies in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Among the most prominent and ideologically distinct was the interethnic collective East West Art Society (EWAS) of San Francisco. This section highlights Asian American members of the EWAS and features work demonstrating their interest in engaging with forms of image-making that blend various influences.

Works in this section by artists of Asian descent showcase varying approaches to abstraction across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These objects broaden our historical, geographical, and cultural understanding of nonrepresentational modes of making and counter the prevailing art historical narrative that Asian Americans were not significant creators of nonrepresentational art during this time.

However, our goals should not only be intellectual, but also practical and ideological. We must note that wherever there is an Afro-descendant population, there exists a movement demanding our rights. We must transform our modern struggle in our national trenches, through support and solidarity in actions that benefit us mutually, and making our presence more visible in order to do away with the obscurities and omissions accumulated in the official histories of our countries.

While the organization and structure described in this handout are necessary components of an effective persuasive essay, keep in mind that writing itself is a fluid process. There are no steadfast rules that you need to adhere to as you write. Simply because the introduction is the first paragraph in your essay does not mean that you must write this paragraph before any other. Think of the act of writing as an exploration of ideas, and let this sense of exploration guide you as you write your essay.

The Best American Short Stories has been published since 1915, making it the oldest continuous series of its type. Starting in 1986, additional titles were added for essays, sports writing, nature writing and more, at which time the broader The Best American Series moniker was introduced. 2ff7e9595c