Word: essayist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Atlantic with four National Magazine Awards (1971-73 and 1979) and its highest circulation ever (351,000). Whitworth will not assume full control of the Atlantic until next spring. But Zuckerman already plans to add popular Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman and British Journalist William Shawcross as contributors. Science Essayist Lewis Thomas and London Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans have been signed as senior advisory editors...
...course, for America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann...
Edward Hoagland is another essayist who has earned his style through adversity. A novelist of modest reputation before turning to the essay (Cat Man in 1956 and The Circle Home in 1960), Hoagland has spent much of his childhood and adult life as a stutterer. ("Being in these vocal handcuffs made me a devoted writer at twenty. I worked like a dog, choosing each word.") Hoagland's style is consonant with the idea that the essay is a variety of "conversational writing." Unshackled, Hoagland converses recklessly, wildly, an abundance of critical detail and blinding enthusiasm fueling his abrupt transitions from...
Hoagland is hardly the first observer of animals and lairs to balance between the rough call of the woods and the concentrated frenzy of big city living. Since Thoreau, the American essayist has been torn by the happy agony of deciding whether to leave the city for the country, and upon leaving, when to return. Nowadays the tension of two homes is stock-in-trade for the essayist, though few display the pertinacious ease and delight with acquired folkways that distinguish both Hoagland and his counterpart, John McPhee...
...peripatetic and specifist of sorts, McPhee -- like his cohorts -- must feel somewhat cheered now that many private concerns have risen to the general interest, and the essay once again enjoys a reasonably wide and diverse circulation. As for success and riches, the lot of the essayist has probably been most realistically defined, once again, by E.B. White. "A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play," assures White, "and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying...