Introduction / Phillip Lopate -- The Nation: Democratic Vistas (1945) / James Agee -- Humor and Faith (1946) / Reinhold Niebuhr -- The Sources of Soviet Conduct (1947) / George F. Kennan -- Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases (1947) / Edmund Wilson -- The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy : should the majority rule? (1947) / Walter Lippmann -- The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1948) / Robert Warshow -- The Herd of Independent Minds (1948) / Harold Rosenberg -- The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (1948) / Robert K. Merton -- Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (1948) / Leslie Fieldler -- Stranger in the Village (1953) / James Baldwin -- Artists in Uniform (1953) / Mary McCarthy -- This Age of Conformity (1954) / Irving Howe -- Sootfall and Fallout (1956) / E. B. White -- On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956) / Vladimir Nabokov -- The University as Villain (1957) / Saul Bellow -- The Last Lover (1958) / Lionel Trilling -- A Good Appetite (1959) / A. J. Liebling -- Making It! (1959) / Seymour Krim -- Boston (1959) / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction (1960) / Flannery O'Connor -- Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (1960) / John Updike -- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960) / Randall Jarrell -- Modernist Painting (1961) / Clement Greenberg -- The Obligation to Endure (1962) / Rachel Carson -- An Evening With Jackie Kennedy (1962) / Norman Mailer -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Writing About Jews (1963) / Philip Roth -- Notes on "Camp" (1964) / Susan Sontag -- The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) / Richard Hofstadter -- The Universal Trap (1964) / Paul Goodman -- The Girl of the Year (1964) / Tom Wolfe -- Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965) / Edwin Denby -- The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) / N. Scott Momaday -- The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention (1969) / Gore Vidal -- The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream (1970) / Albert Murray -- One Night's Dying (1970) / Loren Eisely -- Home Is Two Places (1970) / Edward Hoagland -- On the Morning After the Sixties (1970) / Joan Didion.

"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time." -Amazon.