The 1922 symposium that put American civilization on trial — and sent the jury to Paris.
Essays & criticism
The era's arguments in prose — symposia, verdicts, and stock-takings: the books that told America what it was, and sent a generation abroad to escape the answer.
The twenties ran on arguments as much as on novels. Before and alongside the fiction, a generation of critics — H. L. Mencken swinging the hammer, Van Wyck Brooks taking the longer view, the little magazines supplying the ammunition — conducted a public trial of American civilization: its puritanism, its commercialism, its suspicion of art and pleasure. The essay collection became a cultural event in its own right, and the symposium — many specialists, one verdict — became the form's heavy artillery.
Civilization in the United States (1922) is the form's monument and this shelf's cornerstone: thirty contributors, one facet of national life apiece, and a collective conclusion so bleak its own editor sailed for France on delivering the manuscript. The books in this genre are where the expatriate exodus stops being a mood and becomes an argument — you can read the exact reasoning that packed the boats for Paris.
Read them now as period documents and as uncomfortable mirrors, in either order. The complaints — conformity, commercial culture, a press nobody trusts — have a way of sounding current; and the fiction elsewhere on our shelves is these essays' answer, written from the far side of the Atlantic by the people who took the verdict literally.
Who to read for it
The essays & criticism we recommend
Sixteen years later, Stearns reruns the great inquiry — thirty-six Americans, and a country he no longer wants to flee.
The first Miller book America was allowed to read: stories and essays smuggled home from the Paris years, Tropics not included.
Essays from the turn of the decade — writing, Balzac, healers, and bums — where the Paris provocateur starts sounding like a sage.
A wartime miscellany with one masterpiece inside: 'Reunion in Brooklyn,' the exile's homecoming to the parents he fled.
Henry Miller's 1945 account of driving across the United States for a year and disliking most of what he found.
Three friends argue about abstract painting in one slim volume — the painter from the Jockey bar, Miller, and Saroyan.
Volume two of the Nightmare: America surveyed again — but the heart of the book is the long, aching essay remembering France.
The scandalous autobiographer turns to the shelf: a reading life told like an adventure, from boyhood pulp to Cendrars.
A 1955 mass-market paperback of Henry Miller's legal writing, sold for twenty-five cents while his major books were still banned in America.
Miller on Rimbaud — the boy who invented modern poetry and walked away — in the least objective, most alive study ever written of him.
The scandalous exile finds his paradise: fog, cliffs, children, neighbors, pilgrims — and the question of whether paradise can be lived in.
Henry Miller's best pages from thirty years of writing, selected by his friend Lawrence Durrell.
Late essays from the sage of Big Sur: Thoreau, the young Beats, the art of staying still while beating your wings.
Everything Miller ever said about the work itself, gathered into one volume — the accidental craft book of the century's least teachable writer.
Six late chamber pieces in one volume — the old man's small forms, from a dream of his mother to the view from eighty.
The white whale of the Villa Seurat: the D. H. Lawrence book that nearly swallowed Miller in 1933, published at last in 1980.
The bullfight book: a full treatise on the corrida that keeps turning into a book about death, Spain, and how to write.
The words he spoke over the war: the narration of Joris Ivens's 1937 documentary, printed as a small, strange book the next year.
Four decades of journalism in one volume — Paris cafés for the Toronto Star, Madrid under shells, the Blitz, the liberation ride to the Ritz.
Six hundred letters he ordered never published — Fitzgerald teased, Perkins courted, wives won and lost — the offstage voice, complete with sins.
The craft doctrine, extracted: every passage where Hemingway explains the work — icebergs, morning hours, and stopping while it's going good.
The complete Toronto Star files, 1920–1924: the twenty-something in Paris, learning the style on deadline for a newspaper an ocean away.
The Paris dispatches alone, in a pocket volume — the city these pages map, reported by its most famous arrival at twenty-two.
Before Paris, before the war, before everything: the school newspaper and literary magazine work of Hemingway, sixteen years old.
Every letter he ever wrote, eventually: the Cambridge edition's decades-long project to publish the complete correspondence — volume by volume.
Author and editor, complete: twenty-two years of letters between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins — the working marriage behind the shelf.
Sixty years of war reporting in one book, written by someone who kept going back long after the story stopped being hers.
The other half of the career: fifty years of reporting on everything that was not a war.
Sixty years of letters, edited by her biographer Caroline Moorehead. Faster, funnier and ruder than the prose Gellhorn published.
Six dispatches on what the war was doing to civilians, and the reporting that got her barred.
Gellhorn's letters from 1930 to 1949: the Depression, Spain, Normandy, Dachau and the Hemingway marriage, printed with the replies included.
Colette's most personal book — a meditation on desire, pleasure, and the varieties of love, built from portraits rather than plot.
One long letter to Alfred Perlès — Miller sails to New York in 1935, hates it magnificently, and sails back. A round trip, as the title says.
A thousand pages of argument by mail — Miller and Michael Fraenkel start with Shakespeare and end with everything, from the Villa Seurat to the war.
The Villa Seurat portfolio — portraits, surrealist manifestos, and the essay on Brassaï, gathered by Obelisk in 1938 and never quite reprinted whole.
Miller's surrealist film-on-paper, written after Anaïs Nin's House of Incest — 200 copies from Obelisk in 1937, with a drawing by Abraham Rattner.
Miller's own explanation of the banned books — the essay where he tells censors, critics, and readers what he thought the sex was for.
The lecture years on the page: creativity, women, and the examined life, gathered from the talks that made her a campus phenomenon.
The interviews, collected: three decades of Nin answering questions, from little magazines to the fame years, in one scholarly volume.
Her first book: a defense of Lawrence written in sixteen days, published in Paris in 1932 — the door her whole literary life walked through.
The late essays: masculinity reconsidered, women's becoming, travel, and craft — the last collection published in her lifetime.
The 1947 credo: writing from the unconscious outward — Nin's working method, stated in a pamphlet's span.
A 1946 pamphlet manifesto: why the psychological novel needs the logic of dreams, not the inventory of rooms.
The stray pieces, gathered: four decades of essays and reviews, led by the 1930 Lawrence piece that started her public writing.
Her criticism at full length: the case for the poetic, psychological novel, written at the height of the Diary's fame.
The first one-volume Nin: fiction, diary, and criticism selected in 1973, at the height of the fame, as the front door to the shelf.
The modern one-volume Nin: thirty-eight selections in chronological order, with the whole posthumous shelf finally in the pool.
A quotations collection with receipts: 365 verified Nin lines, each with its citation — the antidote to the internet's fake Nin.
The second year of verified Nin: 365 more sourced quotations, arranged across life, love, consciousness, women and men, and art.
Ten essays, a stepfather's funeral on the day Harlem burned, and eight days in a Paris jail.
Thirteen essays from the years Baldwin came home: Harlem, the segregated South, a writers' congress at the Sorbonne, and the end of his friendship with Richard Wright.
Two letters written for the centenary of emancipation: one to a fifteen-year-old nephew, one about the night Baldwin had dinner with Elijah Muhammad.
The book Baldwin wrote after the funerals: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and a friend he could not get out of jail.
Baldwin on the movies he grew up on, beginning with the film he was taken to at seven and ending with The Exorcist.
Baldwin goes to Atlanta to report on the murders of twenty-eight Black people, most of them children, and comes back unconvinced by the conviction.
Thirty-seven years of essays in one volume, assembled by Baldwin two years before he died — the single book to own if you are only owning one.
James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon had been at the same Bronx high school. Thirty years later they made a book about what America looked like in 1964.
Everything James Baldwin published and never put in a book, gathered twenty-three years after he died: reviews from his early twenties, speeches, open letters, and one short story.
James Baldwin was forty-seven, Nikki Giovanni twenty-eight. A London television studio, one evening in November 1971, and neither of them willing to let the other off easily.
James Baldwin and Sol Stein were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Fifty years later Stein opened the file drawer that held their letters.
Two months in the coal towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, then a long argument with the people Orwell agreed with.
Ten wartime essays on Dickens, Kipling, boys' comics and seaside postcards, including the piece on Salvador Dalí that a publisher cut out of a printed book.
George Orwell's first book of essays: Charles Dickens, the twopenny school-story papers, and Henry Miller's Paris.
Written under the Blitz: George Orwell's argument that England could not win the war without becoming a socialist country.
Letters to a German Friend
Albert Camus
Four wartime letters distinguish love of one’s country from the nationalism that makes murder a virtue.
Nuptials
Albert Camus
Four Mediterranean essays about bodily happiness, ruins, summer and the refusal to postpone life.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
Camus asks whether life is worth living when the universe supplies no final meaning.
The Rebel
Albert Camus
A history and critique of rebellion that asks when resistance turns into justified murder.
The Wrong Side and the Right Side
Albert Camus
Five early essays in which poverty, silence, sunlight and death already form the vocabulary of the later books.
De Profundis
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, combining accusation, self-criticism, memory, suffering, art, and a new interpretation of Christ.
Intentions
Oscar Wilde
Four essays and dialogues in which Oscar Wilde argues that criticism is creative, art need not copy life, and a work should not be reduced to a moral lesson.
The Soul of Man under Socialism
Oscar Wilde
An essay arguing that poverty should be ended by changing property relations, not managed through charity, so each person can develop freely.
America Day by Day
Simone de Beauvoir
A diary of Beauvoir's 1947 journey across the United States, observant about race and class but limited by a visiting European's viewpoint.
Must We Burn Sade? and Other Essays
Simone de Beauvoir
Essays on the Marquis de Sade, political privilege, and the moral limits of claiming absolute freedom.
Pyrrhus and Cineas
Simone de Beauvoir
A short philosophical essay asking why anyone should begin a project when every goal leads to another question: what next?
The Coming of Age
Simone de Beauvoir
A wide study of how societies understand old age and how material conditions shape the lives of older people.
The Ethics of Ambiguity
Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's clearest statement of an existentialist ethics based on freedom, limits, and responsibility to other people.
The Long March
Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's account of a 1955 visit to the People's Republic of China, useful as a record of political travel and limited as an assessment of the state she toured.
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
A two-volume study of how societies make woman the subordinate 'Other' and how that position is lived across a lifetime.
Other styles on the shelf
The Friday Letter
One remarkable essays and criticism pick, when it earns it.
The Friday letter explains one book at a time — what style it works in, why that matters, and where to go next.