A Literary Education and Other Essays

by Joseph Epstein

Overview

Who invented the personal essay? That is hard to say. The ancient Roman philosopher and cynical power broker, Seneca? The 16th century French philosopher Montaigne certainly brought it to a peak of perfection. There were many 19th century masters, not so many after that. Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? That requires no debate at all. It is unquestionably Joseph Epstein. He is not only the best living essayist; he is right up there in the company of Seneca and Montaigne, but one of our own, living in our era and dealing with our pleasures and travails. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. Epstein reads omnivorously and brings us the best of what he reads, passages that we would never have found on our own. How easy it is today, in the digital age, drowning in emails and other ephemera, to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose. Like any master essayist, however, this one brings us more than the shared experience of a lifetime of reading. He brings us himself, alternately scolding and charming, sparkling and deep, buoyant and sad, zany and wise, rebellious and conservative, bookworm and sports fan, clever and everyman, debunker and preservationist, deep into high culture, deep into low culture, curious, fresh, and settled in his ways. This is the friend we all wish we could have, the ideal, humane companion who is completely comfortable in his own human skin. Like Plutarch, he gives us life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is pure pleasure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604190786
Publisher:	Hunter Lewis Foundation
Publication date:	06/10/2014
Pages:	537
Sales rank:	232,040
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Joseph Epstein was editor of the American Scholar. A long time resident of Chicago, he has taught English and writing at Northwestern for many years. He is the author of 23 books, many of them collections of essays, and has also written for numerous magazines including The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Commentary.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 A Literary Education

A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature (2008) 7

Part 2 Memoir

Coming of Age in Chicago (1969) 23

Memoirs of a Fraternity Man (1971) 39

My 1950s (1993) 53

A Virtucrat Remembers (1988) 67

A Toddlin' Town (2009) 97

Old Age and Other Laughs (2012) 107

Part 3 The Culture

The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin (2008) 121

Prozac, with Knife (2000) 135

You May Be Beautiful, but You Gonna Die Some Day (2011) 143

Whose Country 'Tis of Thee? (2011) 149

Stand-Up Guys (2003) 163

You Could Die Laughing: Are Jewish Jokes a Humorous Subject? (2013) 173

Duh, Bor-ing (2011) 183

Nostalgic de le Boeuf (2010) 193

The Symphony of a Lifetime (2010) 201

Part 4 The Arts

What To Do About the Arts (1995) 213

Who Killed Poetry? (1988) 231

Culture and Capitalism (1993) 251

Educated by Novels (1989) 263

Part 5 Education

A Case of Academic Freedom (1986) 281

The Academic Zoo: Theory-in Practice (1991) 307

Lower Education (2011) 325

English As It's Taught (2011) 335

The Death of the Liberal Arts (2012) 341

Part 6 Language

My Fair Language (2012) 359

Heavy Sentences (2011) 367

The Personal Essay: A Form of Discovery (1997) 377

Part 7 Magazines

New Leader Days: Can You Have a Political Magazine without Politics? (2006) 391

Commentary (2010) 405

The New York Review of Books (1993) 419

The TLS (2001) 433

There at the New Yorker (2011) 439

Part 8 Intellectuals

Leo Lerman (2007) 451

Walter Cronkite (2012) 457

Paul Goodman in Retrospect (1978) 469

Saul Steinberg (2013) 479

Hilton Kramer (2012) 489

Original Publication Information for Essays in this Book 499

Index 503

Editorial Reviews

03/31/2014
Epstein follows up Essays in Biography (2012) with another collection of provocative and beguiling thought pieces. The six selections grouped under “Memoir” comprise an informal autobiography that takes the author from his Chicago boyhood to his current life as an obit-reading septuagenarian. In one of the book’s best essays, “A Virtucrat Remembers,” Epstein relates how the liberal advances of the ‘60s turned him off liberalism; he dismantles a polemic against neoconservativism that was published in Dissent in 1973—only to reveal that he was the angry young man who wrote it. A number of these essays grow out of omnivorous reading. From books about the rising popularity of plastic surgery, Epstein deduces that plastic surgeons combine “the work of a sawbones with that of a shrink”—hence the essay’s title “Prozac, with Knife.” The range of his curiosity is exhilarating: he writes as insightfully on art critic Hilton Kramer and the New York Review of Books as he does on higher education and, in “What to Do About the Arts”—inspired by his years serving on the National Endowment for the Arts—on the decline of artistic standards in contemporary America. Though they span nearly 40 years, the essays are remarkable for their consistency of tone and abundant insights about fiction, poetry, philosophy, and sociology. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt Inc. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Joseph Epstein turns out the best essays-of the literary or familiar kind-of any writer on active duty today.. .. Those who've reviewed Epstein's work over the years. .. praise his humor, his erudition, his vast learning, and his elegance.. .. Epstein's writing, like most French desserts, is very rich stuff.

The American Spectator, June 2014 - Larry Thornberry

[Epstein] writes sentences you want to remember.. .. His essays are troves of literary reference and allusion, maps between centuries, countries, genres.. .. [They] have personality and style, yes, but they also have something to say, and that's the pivotal distinction between Epstein and his bevy of imitators.. .. What's more, his wit is unkillable.

The New Criterion, May 1, 2014 - William Giraldi

.. . Maybe it's time for a 'Joseph Epstein Reader' that would assemble the best work from his previous books for old and new fans alike. In the meantime, A Literary Education inspires hope that Mr. Epstein's good run [referring to the author's 24 books] isn't over just yet.

The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2014 - Danny Heitman

Epstein's. .. A Literary Education and Other Essays. .. . is his 24th book. This volume confirms that Epstein is not only the greatest living American literary critic, but also the country's foremost general essayist. He is, almost singlehandedly, holding aloft the flame for what used to be the honorable calling of 'the man of letters.'

COMMENTARY, June 2014 - John Podhoretz

2014-03-18
A curmudgeonly cultural critic collects a potpourri of his pieces from the past 30 years, most from Commentary and the Weekly Standard. Prolific essayist, biographer and novelist Epstein (Essays in Biography, 2012, etc.) never leaves readers wondering about much. He delivers fierce punches to the guts of all sorts here: writers he doesn't care for (Updike, Mailer, Morrison, Vidal, Roth, Rich—both Frank and Adrienne), practices he abhors in higher education (the death of the liberal arts, emphases on feminism and Marxism and various other -isms in the literature curriculum), publications he doesn't like (the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review), child-rearing practices he disdains (contained in a wild essay called "The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin"), poetry he doesn't like and sentences he hates. Such a collection inevitably leads to some repetition, so readers hear a few times about his college days (the University of Illinois, his transfer to the University of Chicago), his early days of being a liberal, his peacetime service in the military and his conversion to conservatism—a transformation occasioned in major part by the excesses of the 1960s and '70s. Epstein does not often communicate any sense of uncertainty; he dispenses opinions and decisions with all the conviction of a judge on an afternoon TV show. Things are so, he seems to say, because I declare them so. Still, his pieces inevitably entertain as well as educate—and/or annoy). He eviscerates Paul Goodman, some colleagues at Northwestern University (where he taught for decades), Maya Angelou and Spike Lee, and he declares that Dreiser and Cather surpass any subsequent American novelists. He also blasts the National Endowment for the Arts (he served the agency for a bit). Lots of erudition and bloody (right-ish) fun.

Kirkus Reviews