A review by mattycakesbooks
The Best American Essays of the Century by Robert Atwan, Joyce Carol Oates

5.0

With relatively few exceptions, there wasn't anything in here I didn't enjoy... Oates did a solid job of selecting not only the best essays, but also essays from a wide breadth of American life. Plenty of women, plenty of writers of color, articles on war, articles on poverty, articles on immigration, articles on culture, articles on science, articles on the environment, and all while staying pretty geographically diverse.

There are, of course, the less impressive articles, the ones that hit me the wrong way or struck me as pretentious, but for every one of those, there were three or four that were brilliant.